Talent
-
- $17.99
Publisher Description
"A clever and delightfully complicated debut...Each bend in this story raises more questions than are answered, in the best of ways and right to the end."—San Francisco Chronicle
Any student of narrative would agree that Anna Brisker, former star of the English department, should be on the brink of a brilliant academic career. But at twenty-nine, Anna is aimless, indolent, nearing the eighth year of her PhD and unable to finish her dissertation, an intellectual history of inspiration. (No, the irony is not lost on her.)
Anna encounters a potential solution to her stasis in the form of Helen Langley, a magnetic, free-spirited woman who's the niece of the late, legendary writer Frederick Langley. Having published three classics in his youth, Freddy fell silent, and the literary world assumed he never wrote again. But Helen confides to Anna that he kept secret notebooks in his later years, notebooks that Helen might be willing to show Anna. As her fascination with Freddy (and Helen) blooms into obsession, Anna finds herself falling prey to fatal misreadings – of herself and others.
A sly and playful unpacking of the cult of the artist that excoriates academia with devilish glee, Talent brings the pressures of the 21st century to bear on the classic campus novel, weaving a twisty, brainy, wickedly hilarious story about our desperate need to believe that we understand…anything.
One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year -- LitHub, The Millions, Thrillist, Entertainment Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her snappy debut, Lapidos questions cultural obsessions with productivity and maximized potential that date back to Jesus's parable of the talents. A graduate student at Collegiate University (a thinly veiled Yale) and on the cusp of 30, Anna struggles to complete her languishing dissertation on artistic inspiration, already looking ahead to "the life of a professor emerita" before her career has even begun. A chance encounter with Helen Langley at the grocery store puts her in "physical proximity to genetic proximity to fame": Helen is the niece of Frederick Langley, a deceased author of some renown who stopped writing after a promising early career. Helen is involved in a legal battle with Collegiate over its possession of Langley's unpublished notebooks, which the idling graduate student hopes to mine for material to kick-start her dissertation. The novel proceeds briskly as Anna delves into Frederick's papers to explain his premature retirement and as the impoverished Helen angles to secure the valuable manuscripts. Anna's voice is sharp and humorous, capturing the jaded graduate student's mix of posturing, snark, and self-loathing, but Frederick isn't as enigmatic as he's intended to be, and his scheming niece Helen is insufficiently drawn, which weakens the pull of the literary mystery. However, the novel is redeemed by its intelligent musings on the responsibilities of literary culture: what do talented authors owe their readers and themselves?
