Ultraluminous
A Novel
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4.4 • 10 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2017," a BOMB's Looking Back on 2017: Literature Selection, a Paris Review Staff Pick, and one of Vulture's 10 Best Thriller Books of 2017.
Girlfriend. Prostitute. Addict. Terrorist? Who is K?
The daring new novel from Katherine Faw, the brilliant author of Young God, is a scintillating story of money, sex, and power told in Faw’s viciously sharp prose. A high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute has just returned to her native New York City after more than a decade abroad—in Dubai, with a man she recalls only as the Sheikh—but it’s unclear why exactly she’s come back. Did things go bad for her? Does she have scores to settle?
Regardless, she has quickly made herself at home. She’s set up a rotation of clients—all of them in finance—each of whom has different delusions of how he is important to her. And she’s also met a man whom she doesn’t charge—a damaged former Army Ranger, back from Afghanistan.
Her days are strangely orderly: A repetition of dinners, personal grooming, museum exhibitions, sex, Duane Reades (she likes the sushi), cosmology, sex, gallery shows, nightclubs, heroin, sex, and art films (which she finds soothing). She finds the pattern confirming, but does she really believe it’s sustainable? Or do the barely discernible rifts in her routine suggest that something else is percolating under the surface? Could she have fallen for one of her bankers? Or do those supposed rifts suggest a pattern within the pattern, a larger scheme she’s not showing us, a truth that won’t be revealed until we can see everything?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Faw's second novel (after Young God) pulses with an irresistible voice and the sense of impending catastrophe. The narrator, a prostitute who gives herself a different name beginning with K to every man, tells her story in sharp, crackling prose. She looks back often on her formative experiences with prostitution in Dubai with a man who had a dangerous career of his own. Now back in her native New York, her weeks are divided between men, aesthetic enhancement like pedicures and teeth bleaching, and her heroin habit. However, what could easily have turned into a blur of sex and drugs is kept in focus by concise but revealing details, such as when K desires "an egg custard that will only be texture, no taste," one of many pieces that feel crucial in assembling the puzzle of her damaged, guarded soul. Such moments also keep her enigmatic humanity burning along with the undercurrent of hopelessness from the trauma of her past. Becoming men's fantasies is as natural as breathing to her; her own identity disappears to make each man come alive, and she seems resentful of and careless with her own life. Yet she dates one man whom she loves, and her caring for him shows a softness even as her rage and despair grow. Faw's writing is raw and not for all tastes, but this incisive character study, featuring an exceptionally clear and memorable prose style, should find its audience.
