Half Life
A Novel
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Ingenious, sensual, gleeful. . . . It demands of its readers only imagination, and rewards them with hilarity, terror, and marvels.”—Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
Nora and Blanche are cojoined twins. Nora, the dominant twin, thirsts for love and adventure, while Blanche has been asleep for nearly 30 years. Determined to shed herself of her her sister’s dead weight, Nora leaves for London in search of the mysterious Unity Foundation, which promises to make two one.
But once Nora arrives in London, the past begins to surface, forcing her into a most reluctant voyage into memory—a search for meaning and understanding, that will push Nora to the brink of insanity. Grotesque, funny, and dazzlingly told, Shelley Jackson’s first novel is an imaginative and touching portrait of two lives in a cleft world yearning for wholeness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A virtuosic but gimmicky fantasy, Jackson's first novel imagines an alternate present where chemical fallout has made Siamese twins a vocal, politically active subculture. Nora Olney, 28, is a torso-conjoined bohemian "twofer" in San Francisco whose twin, Blanche, has been comatose for 15 years. At ease in neither twofer culture nor the single world, and accustomed to controlling her and Blanche's body fully, Nora decides to have "doctor-assisted individuality surgery," appealing to the shadowy Unity Foundation for surgical help even though its legal status is uncertain at best, and it will mean Blanche's death. Arriving in London and threading through the thicket of misdirection that the foundation uses for cover, Nora's reality warps: inanimate objects talk; she throws things unintentionally. As she moves closer to the surgery, Nora must contemplate the possibility that Blanche is trying to communicate with her. Jackson author of a short story collection; a "work" (titled Skin) composed solely of tattoos on the bodies of willing participants; and the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl gives equal time to the twins' eccentric upbringing in Too Bad, Nev., and the (often humorous) ephemera that Nora collects for her scrapbook, "The Siamese Reference Manual." Jackson's prose is nothing short of dazzling, but it's still not enough to give real tension to her oddball plot.
