The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story is Darin Strauss's richly imagined riff on the I Love Lucy star's love life. While there's much to recommend the novel, devoted fans of the beloved television icon who prefer to think of Ball as sexually indifferent should really consider skipping it.
In Strauss's telling, a pre-fame Lucille indulges a kiss with a man at a party on the beach at Coney Island in 1949. The man she kisses is Isidore Strauss, a married property developer from Long Island. This is Lucille's first indiscretion in almost 10 years of marriage to Desi Arnaz, but it's nothing up against Arnaz's numberless extramarital dalliances. A year later, CBS has doubts that America will buy a sitcom centered on the marriage of a white woman and a Cuban man, so Lucille and Desi traipse around the country doing a vaudeville-style revue to prove that audiences will accept them as a couple. Isidore takes his wife to see the show and tells her afterward that he's going to the restroom. Instead he looks for Lucille backstage.
As Lucille's star rises, she continues to think about Isidore. Likewise, she is on Isidore's mind during his professional ascent, which he's having trouble enjoying.
Strauss, the author of three previous novels and the memoir Half a Life, balances Lucille's and Isidore's points of view, but inevitably, The Queen of Tuesday seems to revert to black-and-white whenever it toggles away from her. Still, the narrative, inflected with aspects of Strauss's own family history, is canny, and the writing, while at times overcooked, is neverendingly fresh. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer