Cast in Doubt - Softcover

Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her last collection of short stories, This Is Not It, included 23 stories based on the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

``We were a ragtag band of inhibited outsiders, each a secret and keeping secrets from the others. And ourselves, I suspect.'' That's how the narrator of this puzzle novel by Tillman (Haunted Houses, 1987; Motion Sickness, 1991) describes the expatriate community that surrounds him on Crete. His name is Horace (or so we're led to believe until we're told in the closing pages, ``Change the name and you are the subject of the story''). He's an elderly homosexual living with a young Greek gigolo, and a writer of crime novels. When Horace develops a strange, largely platonic fixation on a new arrival--a pretty girl named Helen, who, rumor has it, prowled the streets of downtown Manhattan like a black cat and now picks up sailors at the harbor--his penchant for sleuthing comes in handy. The girl disappears, and Horace is compelled to search for her among a band of gypsies in the south of the island. All he turns up is her diary, full of quotes from Patti Smith and odd jottings like ``OEDIPUS WRECKS.'' It disappoints him, but later his old buddy from Harvard, Gwen, enlightens him by explaining that in Helen he was looking for himself. ``How tiresome'' he finds it--that he has never really understood anyone because he can't see outside himself. Unlike Horace's, the author's vision is clear--she's produced a handful of sharply drawn secondary characters and a very interior narrative voice that teasingly commands. But she backs away from sense and message by riddling with matters ontological, resulting in a novel that is by turns frustrating and amusing, if slight. Beach reading for the John Hawkes set. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.