Barbara
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Like Nolan’s Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin, a radiant novel tracking the lifecycle of a silver screen starlet rising against the backdrop of the Atomic Age.
Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness.
As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.
Joni Murphy’s Barbara is a deep character study of a woman losing hold and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking. Through an intimate first-person perspective, the novel follows Barbara as she navigates decades and genres—from austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics—glimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th Century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The elegant latest from Murphy (Talking Animals) traces the melancholy life of a movie star whose father worked on the Manhattan Project. The story begins in 1975 when the 40-year-old unnamed narrator is filming a western. The nonlinear narrative then jumps back to her teen years in Colorado, where her mother died by suicide when the narrator was 13. Unmoored by her mother's death, the narrator makes her way to New York City, where she studies acting before joining a summer stock company in Connecticut. Eventually, she meets the man she will marry, Lev Samaras, a director who filmed concentration camps as part of the Army Signal Corps. Samsaras casts the narrator in Saint Barbara, a movie about a Rapunzel-like character whose industrialist father collaborated with fascists during WWII. The narrator intertwines her personal history with reflections on her unnamed father, an engineer who worked on the atomic bomb ("The scientists had to do it all because it could be done," she says of her father's "ethical framework"). The novel, like its main character, drifts from scene to scene without much forward momentum, but the prose, particularly the descriptions of acting and filmmaking, is exceptional. Readers will enjoy this atmospheric work.
