Book Review: Winner of the National Book Award, by Jincy Willett
Rhode Island Noir, dark and funny and almost perfect.
Thomas Dunne Books, 2000, 336 pages
Winner of the National Book Award, the long-awaited novel from the author of the acclaimed collection, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, is an unusual and wonderful novel that is somehow able to be at once bleak and hilarious, light-hearted and profound.
It's the story of two sisters. Abigail Mather is a woman of enormous appetites, sexual and otherwise. Her fraternal twin Dorcas couldn't be more different: she gave up on sex without once trying it, and she lives a controlled, dignified life of the mind. Though Abigail exasperates Dorcas, the two love each other; in fact, they complete each other. They are an odd pair, set down in an odd Rhode Island town, where everyone has a story to tell, and writers, both published and unpublished, carom off each other like billiard balls.
What is it that makes the two women targets for the new man in town, the charming schlockmeister Conrad Lowe, tall, whippet-thin and predatory? In Abigail and Dorcas he sees a new and tantalizing challenge. Not the mere conquest of Abigail, with her easy reputation, but a longer and more sinister game. A game that will lead to betrayal, shame and, ultimately, murder.
I enjoy a lot of authors. I enjoy authors who write crafted, polished prose, authors who are great at worldbuilding, authors who create interesting and complex characters, authors who set up satisfying finales with crowning moments of awesome. I also like slower, literary authors who can make you examine people and society with great, sprawling melodramatic narrative arcs with multiple side plots and secondary characters. Look at my reviews list and you'll see I'm a pretty omnivorous reader. For all that I can be pretty judgmental about what I read (who am I kidding? I enjoy being judgmental), I like my crappy potboilers and guilty pleasures as much as I like my epic SF&F series or timeless literary masterpieces.
But there are not many writers who make me wish I could write like them, and Jincy Willett is one of those writers, and I think Winner of the National Book Award is a near-perfect book.
Jincy Willett first grabbed my attention with The Writing Class, in which she, a little-known writer with some early literary acclaim who apparently slipped into semi-obscurity as a writing teacher, wrote a book whose main character is a little-known writer with some early literary acclaim who slipped into semi-obscurity as a writing teacher. Through the device of the writing class that her main character, Amy, teaches, and Willett's ability to brilliantly mimic many different writing styles, from the hapless Stephen King wannabe to the pretentious MFA grad, Willett gives us a story that begs the reader to say "Haha, you are totally writing a clever parody in which the main character is a self-insert" and then gently mocks the reader who would make those sorts of inferences. It's a great story with a perfectly delivered narrative arc which also winks at the meta and knows you're seeing the wink.
Winner of the National Book Award was Willett's first novel (apparently she published a collection of short stories before this). It was originally published as Fame and Honour, a title only an author who doesn't want to sell books could love.
If you go looking for reviews, they are ambivalent. A lot of people didn't like it, and few loved this book as much as I did. I can understand why. The story itself does not exactly grab you. It's basically a character drama set in a small town in Rhode Island in the late 70s/early 80s. The POV character is a spinster librarian. There's a lot of meta, and Willett taking pokes at New Englanders, at the media, at the literary establishment.
But I think it's exquisitely crafted in every way.
The two main characters are fraternal twin sisters, as unlike as can be. They grow up in small-town Rhode Island amidst the drama caused by Abigail's voracious sexual appetites. The havoc and destruction she wreaks is keenly observed with dismay and awe by her asexual bookish sister Dorcas. Yes, Dorcas. This is like the most hilariously, ostentatiously unostentatious New England novel ever. It's the story of a pair of ridiculous literary figures, a horrible, manipulative cad, the town slut, and a really bad marriage, all told through the eyes of Dorcas, a librarian who, in her own words, was born to be an old maid.
The crafting begins with how the novel is constructed. We begin with Dorcas, sitting down in her library as a hurricane is approaching the town. She has a stack of new arrivals to catalog and shelve, and only someone as dedicated - and spinsterish, with no family waiting at home, and also perhaps needing a distraction - would be sitting in a soon-to-lose power library with an approaching hurricane, looking at books. It turns out one of those books is actually the hot-off-the-presses "biographical"/true crime story of her sister Abigail, who is at this very moment sitting in prison awaiting trial for the murder of her late husband, Conrad Lowe.
See how much is revealed about Dorcas even before we get into the meat of the story? And right up front, before the exposition and the backstory and then the plot, Jincy Willett gives us the hook, the story's climax. We know from the beginning that Abigail is going to marry a guy she's then going to murder. But we don't know the hows or whys or what really happened, and that's the promise waiting for us at the end as we go through their life stories, all related to us within this framework of a (very bad, sensationalist, barely true) book written by a silly, pretentious friend of theirs about Abigail's tragic fate, being disgustedly read by Dorcas over the course of a stormy day.
The weather is symbolic. Literary authors love that shit, and Willett uses a blizzard in the denouement of Abigail's story, wrapped within the hurricane that starts and ends the entire book.
But this book isn't just about clever structuring and meta-narrative. It's also full of perfectly human characters: awful, ridiculous, loveable, delusional, decent or trying to be decent, or just ordinary and boring. Dorcas we get to know as well as she knows herself, possibly better. Abigail we come to know through Dorcas's eyes. Abigail is a full-figured carnal goddess who revels in being the town slut and appalling her eternally virginal sister, who "took a long look around at the age of twelve and decided, nope." Yet Dorcas, we come to realize, may be appalled at her sister's antics, but she never actually prevents Abigail from telling her the details. The two of them understand each other perfectly and hide nothing from one another, at least until Conrad Lowe comes along.
Conrad Lowe's friend Guy DeVilbiss is a pretentious literary writer and perhaps the closest thing to a caricature in the book. Unsuited to being forced to interact with anything real, he and his equally ridiculous wife Hilda, who is the life model for all the fat, unsexy busts and nude sculptures decorating their house, is exactly who you'd expect to write a feminist-glossed Wronged Woman Revenges Herself schlockterpiece about Abigail. Abigail held Hilda in contempt, and Dorcas sees Abigail smirking behind the words Hilda writes, and comments wryly, sometimes angrily, sometimes bemusedly, at what Abigail fed their authoress friend.
Conrad Lowe is a perfect villain, a really nasty piece of work right from the beginning, and Dorcas watches as her sister, the shameless sex-goddess whose heart cannot be captured by any man, falls under his spell. Conrad Lowe isn't just a misogynistic cad: his hatred of women runs long and deep, and Abigail perceives, just in a "funny" little anecdote her future brother-in-law tells her about how he gave up his medical practice - he was a gynecologist (!!!) - that this is a man who will literally spend years playing a long game just to hurt women. Not in monstrous, violent ways, but in petty, banal ways. He doesn't want to kill or beat women. He wants to destroy them. A woman who can resist his charms, a woman who can stand up to him, is a challenge, an adversary, a thing to be ground down and defeated. All while smiling his Lothario leading man grin. Dorcas sees this, knows it, recognizes the danger and watches her sister Abigail pulled in by his gravity and lose herself without ever quite breaking... and still the final move, the endgame, is one she somehow doesn't see coming.
Willett's prose is literary but funny and Dorcas is razor-sharp and a keen observer of fellow humans and only a little bit, willfully, blind to a few unexamined dark corners in her own heart.
So yes, this is a nearly perfect book and while it's not my genre, not my style, and not the sort of the book I'd ever write, it's the sort of book I wish I could write.
Also by Jincy Willett: My reviews of The Writing Class and Amy Falls Down.
My complete list of book reviews.
Thomas Dunne Books, 2000, 336 pages
Winner of the National Book Award, the long-awaited novel from the author of the acclaimed collection, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, is an unusual and wonderful novel that is somehow able to be at once bleak and hilarious, light-hearted and profound.
It's the story of two sisters. Abigail Mather is a woman of enormous appetites, sexual and otherwise. Her fraternal twin Dorcas couldn't be more different: she gave up on sex without once trying it, and she lives a controlled, dignified life of the mind. Though Abigail exasperates Dorcas, the two love each other; in fact, they complete each other. They are an odd pair, set down in an odd Rhode Island town, where everyone has a story to tell, and writers, both published and unpublished, carom off each other like billiard balls.
What is it that makes the two women targets for the new man in town, the charming schlockmeister Conrad Lowe, tall, whippet-thin and predatory? In Abigail and Dorcas he sees a new and tantalizing challenge. Not the mere conquest of Abigail, with her easy reputation, but a longer and more sinister game. A game that will lead to betrayal, shame and, ultimately, murder.
I enjoy a lot of authors. I enjoy authors who write crafted, polished prose, authors who are great at worldbuilding, authors who create interesting and complex characters, authors who set up satisfying finales with crowning moments of awesome. I also like slower, literary authors who can make you examine people and society with great, sprawling melodramatic narrative arcs with multiple side plots and secondary characters. Look at my reviews list and you'll see I'm a pretty omnivorous reader. For all that I can be pretty judgmental about what I read (who am I kidding? I enjoy being judgmental), I like my crappy potboilers and guilty pleasures as much as I like my epic SF&F series or timeless literary masterpieces.
But there are not many writers who make me wish I could write like them, and Jincy Willett is one of those writers, and I think Winner of the National Book Award is a near-perfect book.
Jincy Willett first grabbed my attention with The Writing Class, in which she, a little-known writer with some early literary acclaim who apparently slipped into semi-obscurity as a writing teacher, wrote a book whose main character is a little-known writer with some early literary acclaim who slipped into semi-obscurity as a writing teacher. Through the device of the writing class that her main character, Amy, teaches, and Willett's ability to brilliantly mimic many different writing styles, from the hapless Stephen King wannabe to the pretentious MFA grad, Willett gives us a story that begs the reader to say "Haha, you are totally writing a clever parody in which the main character is a self-insert" and then gently mocks the reader who would make those sorts of inferences. It's a great story with a perfectly delivered narrative arc which also winks at the meta and knows you're seeing the wink.
Winner of the National Book Award was Willett's first novel (apparently she published a collection of short stories before this). It was originally published as Fame and Honour, a title only an author who doesn't want to sell books could love.
If you go looking for reviews, they are ambivalent. A lot of people didn't like it, and few loved this book as much as I did. I can understand why. The story itself does not exactly grab you. It's basically a character drama set in a small town in Rhode Island in the late 70s/early 80s. The POV character is a spinster librarian. There's a lot of meta, and Willett taking pokes at New Englanders, at the media, at the literary establishment.
But I think it's exquisitely crafted in every way.
The two main characters are fraternal twin sisters, as unlike as can be. They grow up in small-town Rhode Island amidst the drama caused by Abigail's voracious sexual appetites. The havoc and destruction she wreaks is keenly observed with dismay and awe by her asexual bookish sister Dorcas. Yes, Dorcas. This is like the most hilariously, ostentatiously unostentatious New England novel ever. It's the story of a pair of ridiculous literary figures, a horrible, manipulative cad, the town slut, and a really bad marriage, all told through the eyes of Dorcas, a librarian who, in her own words, was born to be an old maid.
The crafting begins with how the novel is constructed. We begin with Dorcas, sitting down in her library as a hurricane is approaching the town. She has a stack of new arrivals to catalog and shelve, and only someone as dedicated - and spinsterish, with no family waiting at home, and also perhaps needing a distraction - would be sitting in a soon-to-lose power library with an approaching hurricane, looking at books. It turns out one of those books is actually the hot-off-the-presses "biographical"/true crime story of her sister Abigail, who is at this very moment sitting in prison awaiting trial for the murder of her late husband, Conrad Lowe.
See how much is revealed about Dorcas even before we get into the meat of the story? And right up front, before the exposition and the backstory and then the plot, Jincy Willett gives us the hook, the story's climax. We know from the beginning that Abigail is going to marry a guy she's then going to murder. But we don't know the hows or whys or what really happened, and that's the promise waiting for us at the end as we go through their life stories, all related to us within this framework of a (very bad, sensationalist, barely true) book written by a silly, pretentious friend of theirs about Abigail's tragic fate, being disgustedly read by Dorcas over the course of a stormy day.
The weather is symbolic. Literary authors love that shit, and Willett uses a blizzard in the denouement of Abigail's story, wrapped within the hurricane that starts and ends the entire book.
But this book isn't just about clever structuring and meta-narrative. It's also full of perfectly human characters: awful, ridiculous, loveable, delusional, decent or trying to be decent, or just ordinary and boring. Dorcas we get to know as well as she knows herself, possibly better. Abigail we come to know through Dorcas's eyes. Abigail is a full-figured carnal goddess who revels in being the town slut and appalling her eternally virginal sister, who "took a long look around at the age of twelve and decided, nope." Yet Dorcas, we come to realize, may be appalled at her sister's antics, but she never actually prevents Abigail from telling her the details. The two of them understand each other perfectly and hide nothing from one another, at least until Conrad Lowe comes along.
Conrad Lowe's friend Guy DeVilbiss is a pretentious literary writer and perhaps the closest thing to a caricature in the book. Unsuited to being forced to interact with anything real, he and his equally ridiculous wife Hilda, who is the life model for all the fat, unsexy busts and nude sculptures decorating their house, is exactly who you'd expect to write a feminist-glossed Wronged Woman Revenges Herself schlockterpiece about Abigail. Abigail held Hilda in contempt, and Dorcas sees Abigail smirking behind the words Hilda writes, and comments wryly, sometimes angrily, sometimes bemusedly, at what Abigail fed their authoress friend.
Conrad Lowe is a perfect villain, a really nasty piece of work right from the beginning, and Dorcas watches as her sister, the shameless sex-goddess whose heart cannot be captured by any man, falls under his spell. Conrad Lowe isn't just a misogynistic cad: his hatred of women runs long and deep, and Abigail perceives, just in a "funny" little anecdote her future brother-in-law tells her about how he gave up his medical practice - he was a gynecologist (!!!) - that this is a man who will literally spend years playing a long game just to hurt women. Not in monstrous, violent ways, but in petty, banal ways. He doesn't want to kill or beat women. He wants to destroy them. A woman who can resist his charms, a woman who can stand up to him, is a challenge, an adversary, a thing to be ground down and defeated. All while smiling his Lothario leading man grin. Dorcas sees this, knows it, recognizes the danger and watches her sister Abigail pulled in by his gravity and lose herself without ever quite breaking... and still the final move, the endgame, is one she somehow doesn't see coming.
Willett's prose is literary but funny and Dorcas is razor-sharp and a keen observer of fellow humans and only a little bit, willfully, blind to a few unexamined dark corners in her own heart.
So yes, this is a nearly perfect book and while it's not my genre, not my style, and not the sort of the book I'd ever write, it's the sort of book I wish I could write.
Also by Jincy Willett: My reviews of The Writing Class and Amy Falls Down.
My complete list of book reviews.