Winner of the National Book Award
A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the National Book Award, the long-awaited novel from the author of the acclaimed collection, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, is an unusual and wonderful novel that is somehow able to be at once bleak and hilarious, light-hearted and profound.
It's the story of two sisters. Abigail Mather is a woman of enormous appetites, sexual and otherwise. Her fraternal twin Dorcas couldn't be more different: she gave up on sex without once trying it, and she lives a controlled, dignified life of the mind. Though Abigail exasperates Dorcas, the two love each other; in fact, they complete each other. They are an odd pair, set down in an odd Rhode Island town, where everyone has a story to tell, and writers, both published and unpublished, carom off each other like billiard balls.
What is it that makes the two women targets for the new man in town, the charming schlockmeister Conrad Lowe, tall, whippet-thin and predatory? In Abigail and Dorcas he sees a new and tantalizing challenge. Not the mere conquest of Abigail, with her easy reputation, but a longer and more sinister game. A game that will lead to betrayal, shame and, ultimately, murder.
In her darkly comic and unsettling first novel, Jincy Willett proves that she is a true find: that rare writer who can explore the shadowy side of human nature with the lightest of touches.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Willett's second book, after 1987's Jenny and the Jaws of Life (a collection of stories re-released last year with a foreword by David Sedaris), is a brilliant black comedy starring twins with antithetical dispositions and a handsome stranger with designs on both of them. Zaftig Abigail has turned promiscuity into an art form, while the literary, virginal Dorcas finds pleasure in the library in its books, but also in the graffiti scrawled on its facade. Dorcas recounts Abigail's scandalous coming-of-age, marriage and eventual act of murder, weaving in excerpts from the book version penned later by Abigail and the sisters' friend, Hilda. Through Hilda and her writer husband, Guy, who considers Abigail "art itself," the twins become involved in a circle of artsy, intellectual and morally decadent friends. Abigail soon falls madly in love with Guy's old friend, the charming but sadistic Conrad, and ensnares herself in a destructive spiral of dieting, degradation and dependency. Through a fascinating interplay of violence and desire, Abigail's masochistic tendencies unfold (Dorcas had identified them as a teen: "I stopped hitting her only when I saw, through the stars of my rage, that she loved it"). It's hard to decide whom to cheer for most: Abigail for her triumphant revenge or Dorcas for her sense of humor, keen perception and restraint. Willett does a remarkable job of treating dark subject matter with shimmering playfulness, without diminishing its monstrosity. And embedded in her narrative is also a reflection on the subjective and sensual nature of written expression. Poignant and funny, mean and tender, Willett's novel is exuberantly original.
