★ 07/25/2022
Jones continues her marvelous run after last year’s Pulitzer finalist Palmares with the gloriously demented story of an artist who keeps trying to kill her husband. Amanda Wordlaw, an experimental novelist cum travel writer, accepts an invitation to join her friends Catherine and Ernest Shuger for an extended stay in Ibiza. She’s a platonic third for the Shugers, though the locals all assume the three Black Americans are sleeping together. Catherine isn’t allowed any sharp objects due to her history of trying to kill Ernest, which limits her sculpture practice—she’s working on a mixed-media project called “The Birdcatcher”—and Ernest takes her to a mental hospital whenever she tries to kill him, like the time she snagged a bicycle spoke from a trash heap and attempted to stab him. There’s no why, just the what (“You’d think we’d learn by now,” Amanda narrates. “But somehow we keep the optimism”). As to the when, clues suggest the early 1980s, and every once in a while a character speaks in the decade’s bald vulgarity (“Excuse me, I’m going over here and get a closer look at that piece of ass,” a man says to a woman, about another woman, at a party—“It’s talking to me”). The racism depicted in the art world is sadly timeless, such as the white artist who tells Catherine it’s too bad her culture has no great literature. Jones, implicitly defiant, draws deeply from classic and global literature—a well-placed reference to Cervantes’s windmills leaves the reader’s head spinning. And like one of Amanda’s inventive novels, this one ends on a surprising and playful turn. It ought to be required reading. (Sept.)
Jones continues her marvelous run after last year’s Pulitzer finalist Palmares with the gloriously demented story of an artist who keeps trying to kill her husband . . . . Jones, implicitly defiant, draws deeply from classic and global literature—a well-placed reference to Cervantes’s windmills leaves the reader’s head spinning. And like one of Amanda’s inventive novels, this one ends on a surprising and playful turn. It ought to be required reading.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“The remarkable latest release by acclaimed novelist and poet Jones . . . Her prose is captivating, at moments coolly observational and at others profoundly intimate; the delicate balance is the mark of a truly great storyteller. An intriguing, tightly crafted, and insightful meditation on creativity and complicated friendships.”
—Booklist, Starred Review
“Jones’ mercurial, often inscrutable body of work delivers yet another change-up to readers’ expectations.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“This is a brilliant and unsparing examination of the burdens we place on friendship and marriage, the way that creative genius is misperceived as madness, the clumsy way mental health is addressed, the scourge of racism, and the alchemy of folklore and legacy bound in the secrets we hide.”
—Lauren LeBlanc, Boston Globe
“Don’t call it a comeback . . . Gayl Jones continues her resurgence with this novel focused on Black women creatives on Ibiza as one of them continues trying to kill her husband.”
—Karla J. Strand, Ms.
“Gayl Jones constructs a novel that is part mystery, part thriller, and wholly captivating. . . . a shining segment of the American literary canon has been restored.”
—Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement UK
“Brilliant and incendiary, Jones’s pairing of tragedy with dark humor cuts to the bone.”
—O. Magazine
“[A novel with] the plush scenery of a travelogue, the misshapen soul of a noir, and the anarchic spirit of a trickster tale.”
—The New Yorker
“Wows listeners with characters who are unique and appalling yet captivating.”
—AudioFile
Adenrele Ojo narrates this oddly tantalizing novel by the acclaimed Black author Gayl Jones. In a series of vignettes, it follows the intertwined lives of three members of the Black elite: Catherine Shugar, an abstract artist and sculptor; Ernest, her husband, a respected science writer; and Amanda Wordlaw, a travel writer and onetime author of erotic fiction. It is the clear, sane voice of Amanda who tells the story and intrigues us with the antics of Catherine, who tries to murder her husband every time she is released from a mental institution. Ojo gives Catherine a frenetic, high-pitched voice that makes her seem girlish and charming. Ojo propels this story forward with her dramatic timing and wows listeners with characters who are unique and appalling yet captivating. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Adenrele Ojo narrates this oddly tantalizing novel by the acclaimed Black author Gayl Jones. In a series of vignettes, it follows the intertwined lives of three members of the Black elite: Catherine Shugar, an abstract artist and sculptor; Ernest, her husband, a respected science writer; and Amanda Wordlaw, a travel writer and onetime author of erotic fiction. It is the clear, sane voice of Amanda who tells the story and intrigues us with the antics of Catherine, who tries to murder her husband every time she is released from a mental institution. Ojo gives Catherine a frenetic, high-pitched voice that makes her seem girlish and charming. Ojo propels this story forward with her dramatic timing and wows listeners with characters who are unique and appalling yet captivating. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
2022-07-13
A drolly insinuating chamber piece about a trio of Black American expatriates.
First published in Germany in 1986, this novel would be considered an anomaly for almost anybody except Jones, whose legendary stature among African American novelists was established almost 50 years ago by such provocative inquiries into Black women’s psyches as Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976). Her new spate of publications that began last year with the historical epic Palmares continues with this predictably unpredictable first-person account by Amanda Wordlaw (“Wonderful name for a writer, isn’t it?”), a lapsed author of racy novels like The Other Broad’s Story who has forsaken writing fiction for travel books. As the novel opens, she is living on “the white-washed island of Ibiza” with her longtime friend Catherine Shuger, a prominent sculptor, and Catherine's husband, Ernest, who writes articles for popular science magazines. Amanda wastes no time telling you what’s whack about two-thirds of this triad: Catherine keeps trying to kill Ernest, who in turns puts her into an asylum, from which she is released by Ernest, whom she tries to kill again. And again. It’s all outrageous enough at the outset to make readers anticipate an absurdist-modernist slapstick farce. Yet the icy, deadpan tone of Amanda’s leisurely narrative voice, though seasoned with sneaky wordplay and impish irony, helps make this a quirkier, more reflective kind of comedy. The repartee, as with the rest of the story, can drift and meld into side tangents and back, complete with literary references, art criticism, and coy innuendo. Jones’ impulse to keep her readers alternately off balance and in the weeds threatens to upend the novel altogether, especially at the end, as shifts in tone and locale make you question almost everything that came before. Whether this was intended or not, its effect seems perfunctory, even abrupt. It may not be the most powerful or best realized of Jones’ novels, but it may be the closest she’s come to making us laugh as much as wince. Her vaunted blend of ambiguity and disquiet comes across here as a sly, even smirky dance. And her inquiries into how Black women live now are present throughout. Not just “present,” in fact, but “prescient,” as Amanda herself likely couldn’t keep herself from saying.
Jones’ mercurial, often inscrutable body of work delivers yet another change-up to readers’ expectations.
