Private Correspondences

by Trudy Lewis

Overview

Libby is a politician's daughter maturing amidst barely sublimated violence, sexuality, and corruption. Her tangled emotions about her father and the roil of sexual and social politics surrounding her are brought into relief when she receives a shocking anonymous letter. Horrified but fascinated, Libby works to discover the identity and the motivation of the sender while struggling to interpret the layers of deceit and manipulation enveloping her.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810150331
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	09/23/1994
Edition description:	1
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.20(d)

Editorial Reviews

Winner of TriQuarterly's 1994 William Goyen prize for fiction, this powerful debut novel explores the hidden niches of cruelty, lust, political corruption and misogyny. Narrator Libby Martin, daughter of a state senator, is 15 when she receives an anonymous obscene letter threatening her with rape and mutilation. The missive changes her life and her perceptions of her family and friends. In a course of painful discoveries, she confronts her father's duplicitous adulteries, her mother's frustrated obsessions with order and cleanliness and a friend's betrayal of trust and loyalty. Finally, in a violent and sexually graphic conclusion, she gains a form of empowerment. With perfectly pitched dialogue and a story grounded in details of contemporary manners and mores-from rock music to sexual harassment in the political arena-Lewis's shattering study of sexual violence and individual vulnerability is both timely and universally resonant. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

One fine day, 15-year-old Libby Martin, the daughter of a U.S. senator, receives a threatening anonymous letter. This event unleashes a torrent of jumbled half-memories and sexual fantasies that concludes with a convoluted rape and murder sequence. A victim of yet another dys-functional family with a womanizing father and a bitter mother, Libby is caught up in her own sexual innocence at a time when she is most vulnerable. The winner of the 1994 William Goyen Prize for fiction, this first novel unfortunately suffers from overstylized prose and a weak plot. Most libraries can pass.-Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll. Lib., N.C.

Library Journal

This visceral, unforgettable first novel explores the dark awakening of female sexuality in a violent male atmosphere of politics, familial decay, and studied barbarism. Libby Martin, the 15-year-old daughter of a state senator, receives an anonymous psychopathic letter threatening her with sexual disfigurement. Sharp and articulate, Libby negotiates the labyrinth in her life presented in the form of her father's infidelities and her mother's emotional widowhood, yet she still has interest in courting the embodiment of misogynist terror that is threatening her, who turns out to be a Tantric multimillionaire crazy with politics, the Second Coming, and virgin blood. Lewis is perceptive; her vision is razor sharp in slicing away the counterfeit differences separating victim from abuser here. This is neither a suspense novel nor a horror thriller; it is a brilliantly conceived account of the innocence and complicity with which a young woman enters a world of masculine fanaticism and abuse.

Greg Burkman

"This erotic, steamy . . . tightly wound mystery story . . . will hold your interest to its phantasmagorical conclusion." —Chicago Tribune



"Written like a love letter to a killer." —Review of Contemporary Fiction

From the Publisher