Don't Be a Stranger
A Novel
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • A mesmerizing new novel from the author of Evening: the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life • A luminous story about erotic obsession, the hunger for intimacy, communication, and oblivion that will appeal to readers of Miranda July's All Fours
“Minot exquisitely explores desire and denial, intimacy and illusion in a ravishing, haunting, and insightful tale of sexual ecstasy and emotional torment, integrity and creativity, self and motherhood.” —Booklist (starred review)
"Minot’s writing is like a diamond knife on ice.” —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize winning author
Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence: On the surface she is a responsible mother, managing the demands of friends, an ex-husband, home; but emotionally, psychologically, sexually, she is consumed by desire and increasingly alive only in the stolen moments-out-of-time, with Ansel in her bed.
Don't Be a Stranger is a gripping, sensual, and provocative work from one of the most remarkable voices in contemporary fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Minot's lilting if myopic latest (after the collection Why I Don't Write) revolves around a Manhattanite mother obsessed with a handsome younger man. Ivy, a divorced writer in her early 50s, is raising her third-grader son, Nicky, mostly on her own. After she meets and falls for Ansel Fleming, an enigmatic ex-con musician two decades her junior, the novel jumps from one of their trysts to the next, chronicling Ivy's mounting preoccupation with her new lover. Their encounters are sporadic, so Ivy waits and broods, while caring for the ever-perceptive Nicky, who's desperately trying to navigate his parents' separation. But Nicky's father is in Virginia, and Ivy is exhausted and vulnerable from managing life by herself. The reader gets only Ivy's side of the affair, and it isn't long before taciturn, self-absorbed Ansel begins to look like a bona fide jerk, and Ivy like a fool. As in Minot's previous novels, sex is portrayed as a means of transcendence. The prose is often poetic, but the purportedly transportive nature of Ivy's lovemaking with Ansel tends to strain credulity. For a tale of unrequited obsession, the tone is appropriately melancholic, if a bit too one-note. There are glimmers of Minot's great early work, but this doesn't scale the same heights.
