People Collide
A Novel
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
“One of the year's most compelling reads.”—Washington Post
“Its naturalness and ease with the most fundamental questions of existence make it a big project knocking around in a small package.”—New York Times
From the acclaimed author of The Atmospherians, a gender-bending, body-switching novel that explores marriage, identity, and sex, and raises profound questions about the nature of true partnership.
When Eli leaves the cramped Bulgarian apartment he shares with Elizabeth, his more organized and successful wife, he discovers that he now inhabits her body. Not only have he and his wife traded bodies, but Elizabeth, living as Eli, has disappeared without a trace. What follows is Eli’s search across Europe and to America for his missing wife—and a roving, no-holds-barred exploration of gender and embodied experience.
As Eli comes closer to finding Elizabeth—while learning to exist in her body—he begins to wonder what effect this metamorphosis will have on their relationship and how long he can maintain the illusion of living as someone he isn’t. Will their new marriage wither completely? Or is this transformation the very thing Eli and Elizabeth need for their marriage to thrive?
A rich, rewarding exploration of ambition and sacrifice, desire and loss, People Collide is a portrait of shared lives that shines a refreshing light on everything we thought we knew about love, sexuality, and the truth of who we are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the engrossing latest from McElroy (The Atmospherians), a couple's stagnant marriage is enlivened after the husband wakes up in his wife's body. When Elizabeth, a writer and academic, receives a teaching fellowship, she and her husband move from the U.S. to Bulgaria. There, she goes to work every day, while Eli, who is also a writer, grows increasingly unhappy ("Marriage had melted our days into one warped single day, like a wax statue burned to a blob," he muses). Their routine is shaken when Eli realizes one morning that he has somehow come to inhabit Elizabeth's body and sets out to determine what happened to his own body, and to Elizabeth. A comedy of errors ensues, fueled by the question of whether the couple will reunite and whether Eli will be able to change back, as Eli-as-Elizabeth follows his wife's trail to Paris. It would be a spoiler to reveal how Eli's change impacts the marriage, but McElroy deserves credit for an imaginative and no-holds-barred exploration of Eli's gender and sexuality after the change (during a sex scene in a museum bathroom, Eli remarks on "the voice of my own desire cleansed of all inhibitions"). It's an impressive twist on the familiar trope of marital ennui.
