The End Of Alice
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3.7 • 53 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the 2013 Orange Prize–winning author of May We Be Forgiven.
Only a work of such searing, meticulously controlled brilliance could provoke such a wide range of visceral responses. Here is the incredible story of an imprisoned pedophile who is drawn into an erotically charged correspondence with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. As the two reveal—and revel in—their obsessive desires, Homes creates in The End of Alice a novel that is part romance, part horror story, at once unnerving and seductive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like recent novels by Susannah Moore and Joyce Carol Oates, Homes's latest (after her A Country of Mothers) is a literary serial-killer novel, by turns sensational and clever, smutty and powerful. It is told as a prison confession, by a notorious but unnamed pedophile in his 23rd year at Sing Sing who has begun to receive letters from a depressed, rebellious (and also unnamed) 19-year-old. Trapped at home in Scarsdale for the summer, boxed in by her callous suburban parents, she acts out the turmoil and anomie of nascent adulthood by embarking on a salacious affair with a 12-year-old male neighbor. Her voice emerges in short, quizzical letters to the narrator. But, as refracted through his self-consciously mannered, feverish and puerile imagination, it's impossible to tell where she ends and he begins: her precocious erotic acrobatics resemble his rough jailhouse sex; her raunchy paeans to pubescent flesh echo his carnal obsessions. Her letters also prompt the narrator to remember his own abuse by his mother and his gruesome murder of Alice Sommerfield, a 12-year-old who, he claims, seduced him. With its allusions to Lolita and Lewis Carroll, this is a lurid but weirdly arch page-turner that may prove too unsavory for all but the most jaded readers. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
Never before
I have never read anything quite like this. It makes you want to throw it across the room, but you can't stop reading it at the same time.
LOVE
So incredibly unsettling. A very different and interesting take on CP.
Presumptious
It’s painfully obvious that the author tried to imitate the clever writing style of Nebekov in Lolita but only resulted in obnoxiously overused adjectives and ham-fisted distractions. Some graphic scenes but all are more irritating than outright disturbing. The storyline was strangely hard to follow yet predictable. I don’t understand the point of the female pen-pal. It seemed forced and unbelievable, it in a good way. Alice’s vocabulary, also unbelievable. Alice’s actions, turning her into the aggressor of the “relationship” making her seem more overly slutty than precocious, also unbelievable. Climax was hasty and poorly escalated. Too many dead ends. This subject matter is always upsetting, but the writing style seems to play on the sympathies of pedophiles, also something that made me dislike this book.