Narcissus Ascending: A Novel

by Karen McKinnon

Overview

Becky, Hugh, Dahlia, and Max. Friends who have formed a dysfunctional but necessary surrogate family. Callie, the crisis-prone, vivid, manipulative chameleon whose friendship has damaged them all individually but who still haunts their waking and sleeping dreams.

Becky, orphan, survivor, caffeine addict, on the verge of 30 and hoping to become famous with her first solo show of dismemberment collages in New York's East Village. Hugh, now a CPA in California, once the most sophisticated undergrad and object of Becky's frustrated desire and rivalry with Callie. Max, all leather, brooding and disguise, the actor who Callie left Hugh for, and who also had an affair with big-hearted, victimized dancer, Dahlia.

For as long as they have known each other their common language has been Callie—past tense. When Dahlia plots a revenge drama to be staged at Becky's gallery opening, she unwittingly revives their nostalgia for the outcast Callie's seductive charm and sets in motion a plan that forces Becky and Callie to play out their lethal emotional rivalry to the end. Told from the point of view of Becky, Narcissus Ascending is an unputdownable debut. Karen McKinnon's dissection of friendship, and the manipulative rivalry of two strong women is provocative and disturbing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312312183
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/28/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

Karen McKinnon lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

Narcissus Ascending stages a sly face-off between artworld ethics and aesthetics while entertaining with juicy plot twists. A hearty welcome, then, to Karen McKinnon, also plainly on the rise.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Compulsively readable.” —Marie Claire

“Raw and knowing.” —The New York Times

“[A] tongue-in-cheek send-up of the disaffected, over- privileged, solipsistic, apolitical, anti-intellectual, urban twentysomething crowd.” —The Washington Post

“[Narcissus Ascending] draws readers in and dares us to accept the challenge of sympathizing with characters that aren't especially sympathetic, and care about the ways in which their lives will be altered.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Taut and fast-paced, McKinnon's first novel offers both insight into an artist's mind and an insightful portrait of the dynamics of a group of friends.” —Booklist

“A gripping, revealing, entertaining debut.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

McKinnon's debut offers a tightly focused group portrait of 20-something friends in Manhattan's East Village. Becky is an artist who turns photos of herself into collages; she's in love with Hugh, an accountant, and her best friend is Dahlia, a dancer. Erstwhile actor Max lurks around the edges of this makeshift family. Becky narrates, but it's Callie beautiful, treacherous, inscrutable and absent who is the novel's truest subject. The fast-paced story follows Dahlia's plan to finally break away from the femme fatale who has wounded them all, by inviting her to the opening of Becky's first show, where Callie will see them all happy and triumphant. Francine Prose gave McKinnon a New Voice Fiction Award for this work as a novel-in-progress, and the book's first half makes it easy to see why. The writing is exquisitely economical, each word a precise fit with the next: "His lips are slightly parted, the color of my chair. The pink velvet needs recovering. I like coffee and I'm careless." McKinnon also reproduces the overlapping rhythms of speech among old friends authentically, and Becky has a pleasingly dry sense of humor. But as the novel spirals into a revenge scenario, the story devolves into junior high histrionics, including an extravagant faked suicide attempt and elaborately unhealthy sex. By novel's end, the promise of its beginning the precision, the wit, the emotional clarity is overwhelmed by adolescent melodrama. Author tour. (June) Forecast: It's unlikely this title will appeal to an audience other than urban women under 25, despite the formidable blurb roster, including Andrea Barrett and Claire Messud. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A self-consciously literary but perceptive and well-paced first outing about the relationships among a handful of self-absorbed East Village hipsters. Dreaming of the day her work will be at MoMA, Becky, an ambitious and talented collagist, prepares for her first solo show in her apartment off Avenue A. On hand are Hugh, an old flame visiting from San Francisco; Dahlia, a sometime dancer and full-time rich kid, currently Becky's best friend; and, Max, a vain and seductive actor, invited by Dahlia despite Becky's protests. Dahlia has decided that Becky's opening is an opportunity to demonstrate to one other person, the wildly dramatic femme fatale Callie, that the four of them-each at one time involved with, in love with, betrayed by, and/or obsessed with Callie-have moved on and are better off without her. Leading up to the opening, McKinnon recalls the group's past, then proceeds in present time as Callie pursues Becky's friendship and exploits her weaknesses; Callie cheats on Hugh with Max; Callie seduces Dahlia, then rejects her, then tells Becky it was her she wanted all along. Initially intrusive, McKinnon's arty prose style-no quotes for dialogue, no paragraph breaks between speakers, adjectival constructs like "speechimpedimented"-is ultimately well suited to the exploration of self-deception and self-justification. In the climactic scene, Callie, finally onstage, discovers that Becky has turned the most vulnerable moment of her past into art. In a whiplash-fast reinterpretation, we see that emotionally manipulative Callie (her combined suicide attempt/art vandalism is masterful) has been outmaneuvered by the heretofore apparently put-upon Becky, revealed now as a (to the author'scredit, still-sympathetic) monster of ambition. The bare bones here could have become nothing more than a twentysomething melodrama, but McKinnon brings to it the breathtaking, self-important, urgency of youth, along with insight into the mind of the hungry artist. A gripping, revealing, entertaining debut. Author tour

Kirkus Reviews