The Complicities

by Stacey D'Erasmo

Overview

“ELECTRIFYING—A TREASURED WRITER WORKING AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS.” —Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

A haunting and emotionally fraught story of a woman dealing with the ripple effects of her husband’s financial fraud—and with what she knew, or pretended not to know, about it

After her husband Alan’s massive white-collar crimes are exposed, Suzanne’s wealthy, comfortable life shatters: Alan goes to prison, and Suzanne files for divorce. Ignoring a steady stream of calls from her ex at Norfolk State Prison, Suzanne thinks she can cleanse herself of all connections to her ex-husband and their old life together. Instead, she decamps to a Massachusetts beach town where she creates a new life and identity.

Then Alan is released early, and the many people whose lives he has ruined demand restitution. At the same time, awestruck and obsessed by the spectacle of a major whale stranding on a beach near her home, Suzanne makes an apparently high-minded decision that in turn reverberates not only through Alan’s life as he tries to rebuild but also through the lives of their son, Alan’s new wife, his estranged mother, and, ultimately, Suzanne herself.

A resonant and bitingly perceptive story about the people next to the bad guys—the queasy and ambiguous territory people like Suzanne inhabit as they stand by, and the ways in which they try to thread the needle of their culpability—The Complicities is a searing look at moral responsibility, and about who, in the end, pays for a crime.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643751962
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	09/20/2022
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	8.10(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of four novels and one book of nonfiction. She’s been the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, and a Lambda Literary Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, among other awards. She is an Associate Professor of Writing and Publishing Practices at Fordham University.   
 

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/13/2022

Three women consider their relationships with a white-collar criminal in this perfect outing from D’Erasmo (Wonderland). The lion’s share is narrated by Suzanne, whose ex-husband, Alan, “did things with people’s money that you aren’t really supposed to do” when they were married. After the divorce, Suzanne moves to Chesham, Mass., a down-at-the-heels Cape Cod beach town, to figure out her next move. The second woman is Lydia, whom Suzanne describes as “young, willowy, blonde.” Lydia, who is partially disfigured from a car accident, falls in love with Alan after he’s released from prison; her take on Alan is that “he’d done his time.” Then there’s Sylvia, Alan’s estranged mother, a former “wild child” in Suzanne’s view, from whom he inherited his talent with numbers. Into this nuanced story D’Erasmo drops an unexpected fifth character, a whale that beaches near Suzanne’s new home in Chesham. The whale—enormous, otherworldly, and in distress—awakens a part of Suzanne that she never knew existed. “Maybe,” she thinks, “all of our misfortune had happened to bring me there, to meet and help this grand, suffering creature.” The sentiment leads her to an act with cascading and devastating consequences for Lydia, Sylvia, and Alan. With smooth shifts in perspective and understated and precise prose, D’Erasmo demonstrates a mastery of the craft. The result is propulsive and profound. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2022

D'Erasmo's fifth novel (after Wonderland) is told in the voice of the 50-ish Suzanne, whose lifestyle as a wealthy housewife ends abruptly when her husband, Alan, a charming sociopath, is imprisoned for financial crimes. She divorces him, estranging herself from her son, and moves to a Cape Cod resort town, where she ekes out a modest existence as a masseuse. Suzanne volunteers with community members assisting a whale beached on a nearby shore, prompting musings on society's wider complicities in destroying the environment. Later—the novel's timeline is purposefully vague—Alan is released and marries a once beautiful woman named Lydia, now partially disfigured from a fiery accident. Suzanne ultimately connects with Lydia and Alan's mother, Sylvia, a nomadic older woman who supports herself through small-time gambling and must ultimately ask herself how complicit she was in Alan's crime. VERDICT This enjoyable novel is filled with intriguing characters, whom D'Erasmo wrangles with deft changes of viewpoint, and the prose abounds with lyrical imagery. But its particular strength is its examination of that liminal space between innocence and culpability, leaving readers to judge whether these characters are as innocent as they want to believe.—Reba Leiding

Library Journal

2022-06-22
A Massachusetts woman tries to rebuild her life after her husband goes to prison for a white-collar crime.

Suzanne and Alan had a good life in Boston. They had a big house, with a housekeeper and a gardener, a darling if somewhat aimless son, the freedom to travel. All of this was courtesy of Alan’s successful brokerage business and Suzanne’s ability to keep the household running smoothly. But then everything blew up: Alan had been defrauding people and is sent to prison for his crimes, and Suzanne leaves, insisting to anyone who will listen, including the reader, that she didn’t understand enough about money to know what Alan was doing, not really. The novel begins with Suzanne arriving in the seaside town of Chesham, trying to start her life over as a massage therapist (or “bodywork” practitioner), to reconnect with her college-age son, who has sided with Alan, and to come to terms with her own complicity in the collapse of her life. D’Erasmo sets herself up for a challenge, perhaps, in trying to make wealthy white-collar criminals sympathetic, but in many ways this circumstance is beside the point. Though Suzanne gets the most airtime, her central narrative is spliced together with the perspectives of two other women: Lydia, Alan’s new wife, whom he met after being released from prison and who has demons of her own; and Sylvia, Alan’s estranged mother. It’s only in piecing together all three of these narratives that we get a fuller picture of Alan, and that’s the point, through D’Erasmo’s clever telling—people can never be seen whole, and parts you think you see never tell the full tale. “A real genealogy chart would trace damage back and back,” Suzanne muses. “It would look like a kaleidoscope.”

Slow burning but thoughtful and deftly structured.

Kirkus Reviews

"[A] perfect outing . . . With smooth shifts in perspective and understated and precise prose, D’Erasmo demonstrates a mastery of the craft. The result is propulsive and profound."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The Complicities had me enthralled. This gripping, human tale of our crimes—financial, environmental, self-delusional—is impossible to put down. D’Erasmo weaves a thriller of a tale, exposing sticky webs of corruption that entangle our lives and fates, even those who fantasize about their innocence, redemption and escape."—Samantha Hunt, author of The Unwritten Book: An Investigation

“The Complicities is a subtle masterpiece. Imagine a voice—lyrical and low, intimate and insistent—whispering in your ear. Half-told truths simmer below the surface, like the uneasy murmuring of a conscience. Mesmerized, you listen. There is menace here in D’Erasmo’s disquieted world, and terrible beauty, too. Things are not what they appear to be. We are not who we think we are, either, and yet we are complicit.”—Ruth Ozeki, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

“In Stacey D'Erasmo's wonderful new novel, The Complicities, the past catches up to the present and overtakes it. All the scattered misdeeds and cut corners and malfeasances come together as crimes, big and small, and the characters either see the criminality or try to ignore it. But this suspenseful novel sees it all, and I found myself enlightened and deeply moved by its compelling story.”—Charles Baxter, author of The Sun Collective

“What does it mean—in such a corrupted world—to reckon with and atone for our own complicities? Stacey D’Erasmo’s latest unspools with the twisty intensity of a psychological thriller and the oceanic depth of a literary tour de force. The Complicities is an electrifying novel of powerful moral complexity, from a treasured writer working at the height of her powers.”—Laura van den Berg, author of I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

From the Publisher