Discipline
A Novel
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- Vorbestellbar
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- Erwartet am 20. Jan. 2026
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a “lit world phenom” (Harper’s Bazaar)
“An exhilarating, exquisite book, full of an eerie intelligence and startling compassion . . . a pitch-perfect novel.”—Ayșegül Savaș, author of The Anthropologists
A BEST BOOK OF THE SEASON: Bustle, Debutiful, Harper's Bazaar
I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. Yet I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow.
Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she’s seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends.
But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she’s imagined it.
A pristine and provocative high-wire act toggling the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive and the possibilities that lie beyond them, Discipline launches a spellbinding inquiry into the nature of art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pham, author of the memoir Pop Song, turns to fiction with the dazzling story of an art critic who publishes a novel about the former professor who rejected her after their affair. On Christine's book tour, she takes stock of her motivations for writing the novel, reexamines her connection to the work of the artists who shaped her, and reflects on how she floundered in art school until a popular professor began consistently praising her work and extending invitations to his home for social gatherings. After they had sex, he stopped contacting Christine, causing her to spiral and cease painting altogether ("It was too hard to decouple my work from my body, which felt like something I was carrying around, burdened with and stained by association"). Pham's novel takes a dramatic turn when Christine begins receiving cryptic messages from the professor, who invites her to visit him in Maine. It's a page-turner, but the main event is Christine's meditations on art, ambition, and the relationship between art and life, as when she looks at the photorealistic paintings of Vija Celmins ("I had never truly tried to replicate life the way Celmins did, in its exactitude, down to the finest detail. But I did think there was something important, maybe even necessary, in trying to make something that depicted, even if not life as it was, then life as how it felt"). This is electrifying.
