Palladio
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
In her small upstate New York town, Molly Howe is admired for her beauty, poise, and character, until one day a secret is exposed and she is cruelly ostracized. She escapes to Berkeley, where she finds solace in a young art student named John Wheelwright. They embark on an intense, all-consuming affair, until the day Molly disappears-again. A decade later, John is lured by the eccentric advertising visionary Mal Osbourne into a risky venture that threatens to eviscerate every concept, slogan, and gimmick exported by Madison Avenue. And much to John's amazement, one of the many swept into Osbourne's creative vortex is the woman who left him devastated so many years before.
In a triumph of literary ingenuity, Jonathan Dee weaves together the stories of this unforgettable pair, raising haunting questions about the sources of art, the pain of lost love, and whether it pays to have a conscience in our cynical age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Our culture propagates no values outside of the peculiar sort of self-negation implied in the wry smile of irony..." according to Mal Osbourne, the iconoclastic advertising genius who founds Palladio, the eccentric Charlottesville, Va., advertising agency in this new novel by Dee (The Lover of History). To fight irony, Mal simply lets his employees, a motley crew of artists and writers, make avant-garde art. He then "allows" companies to attach their names to it. In an unlikely turn of events, the agency soon generates buzz, as does Mal's anti-ironic persona. Mal's troubleshooting assistant, John Wheelwright, has been drawn to Palladio from a Manhattan agency, a move that costs him his girlfriend. John had a deeper relationship in his early 20s, when he was a student at Berkeley, with Molly Howe, a gorgeous, confused girl with a complicated family history. It's John's bad luck when Molly reappears 10 years later, on the arm of her boyfriend, Dexter Kilkenny, a documentary filmmaker. Dex, who secretly loathes Mal Osbourne, has come to Palladio to try to persuade Mal to let him make a film about the agency. Things spin out of control for John when Mal falls for self-destructive Molly, who has become " the kind of woman a certain kind of man will want to wreck himself against." Dee has obviously learned some tricks from Updike, which he puts to good use as a painter of Molly's hometown. An astute observer of contemporary society, he is strikingly perceptive about the secret lives of teenagers, the alienation of the American family, advertising culture and the inescapable moral ambiguities of modern life. Though his message is bleak, his measured, textured prose sustains tension, and the depth and unflinching honesty of his characterizations grant the narrative integrity and strong emotional power.
