Tender
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A mother and son inhabit an isolated and increasingly dangerous private world.
The third and final installment of Ariana Harwicz's "Involuntary Trilogy" finds us on familiar, disquieting ground. Under the spell of a mother’s madness, the French countryside transforms into a dreamscape of interconnected imagery: animals, desire, the functions of the body. Most troublingly: the comfort of a teenage son. Scorning the bourgeois mores and conventionality of their small town, she withdraws him from school and the two embark on ever more antisocial and dangerous behavior. Harwicz is at her best here, building an interior world so robust, and so grotesque, that it eclipses our shared reality. Savage, and savagely funny, she leaves us singed, if not scorched.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the contemporary French countryside, the potent latest from Harwicz (Feebleminded) offers a layered and demanding examination of one woman's relationships with her lover and her teenage son. The unnamed narrator lives with her son in a rundown farmhouse. Both shoplift from the local grocers, the son frequently skips school, and a social worker appears at the family's home, demanding answers about his absences. An Oedipal complex grows, with the narrator frequently waking to find her son on top of her. Meanwhile, she carries on a violent affair with the owner of a nearby vineyard, and when the man seems to lose interest, she and her son bombard his home with stones and flee town to avoid the consequences. Less a straightforward narrative than a stream of consciousness tour of the mother's jumbled experiences, Harwicz paints a portrait of a troubled trio headed toward destruction. The prose is at turns poetic ("There is nothing more narcotic than this sky"), terse, and darkly funny. As ever, Harwicz both impresses and repels with her blistering descriptions of the extremes of human behavior.
