Inside
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- ¥1,700
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
“A skillful storyteller . . . attractively quick-witted and wry.” —J. M. Coetzee
“Ohlin has a great eye, a great ear, and all the other equipment auguring a very successful future.”—Jay McInerney
“Expect to hear her spoken of in the same reverent breath as Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams.” —Heidi Julavits
From the highly acclaimed author of The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories, a resonant novel of entwined lives and a woman with an unsettling ability to broach the innermost dynamics of the people around her.
When Grace, an exceedingly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man who has just failed to hang himself, her instinct to help kicks in immediately. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us.
This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A trio of interlocked stories, Ohlin's bleak second novel shadows three broken people on the hunt for fulfillment who sabotage any true chance of finding it. Grace, an indiscriminately nurturing yet controlling therapist, falls hard for "Tug," a PTSD-afflicted stranger she discovers after a botched suicide attempt; with all the glaring red flags Ohlin plants, it's a wonder Grace doesn't see his second attempt this one successful coming. Mitch, Grace's brooding ex-husband, takes up with an exacting beauty far beyond his league; surprisingly to him, if not to readers, she shacks up with her gynecologist after Mitch goes away on business. And then there's the morally vapid Annie, a former cutter and one of Grace's ex-patients, who abandons her banal New York life to pursue stardom via copious sexual conquests in Hollywood; the glamorous lifestyle, of course, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some juicy side plots such as the saga involving the pregnant homeless runaway who ingratiates herself with Annie aren't given enough room to breathe, perhaps due to Ohlin's flair for crafting emotionally complex short stories that are often left open-ended. Nonetheless, the demonstrated chasm between her characters' intentions and actions and what inevitably transpires is, perhaps like life, what makes this book so voluminous and so empty at the same time.
