11/18/2019
National Book Award–winner Tuck (The News from Paraguay) probes the gulf between expectations and reality as well as between outward appearances and internal disquiet in this collection of four short stories and a novella. The title novella is set in 1963, in the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination. In the horse-riding, fox-hunting milieu of Albemarle County, Va., the wealth and privilege of white residents heighten a sense of insularity and innocence that, as readers know and Tuck hints at, will soon be shattered. The unnamed narrator, a young mother of twin boys and confined to a comfortable but stifling marriage, embarks on an affair with the sexy but un-intellectual Cliff. Meanwhile, she’s rereading Wuthering Heights, and Tuck’s measured prose contrasts its matter-of-factness with the passionate overtones of Brontë’s original. The accompanying stories also showcase the author’s mastery of shorter form fiction. “Labyrinth Two” imagines the interiority of the subjects in a 1950s photograph. The remaining stories have more contemporary settings: “The Dead Swan” finds a young woman heartbreakingly optimistic about her addict boyfriend’s hopes for recovery, while “A Natural State” unfolds largely through emails. In what might be the most gut-wrenching story, “Carl Schurz Park” finds a young man, newly married and about to become a father, hiding a horrific secret from his youth. Tuck’s restrained and elegant stories deceptively carry a deep emotional heft. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Feb.)
Praise for Heathcliff Redux
New York Times Editors' Choice
Named One of "10 Best Books to Read in 2020" by BBC
Named One of "9 Best Short-Story Collections" by New York Magazine
“[R]emarkably arresting . . .. It’s a master class in digression as a narrative device... There’s something endlessly fascinating in the way Tuck’s interest in literary relationships extends even to the works in her own oeuvre.” —New York Times Book Review
"Erotic, unforgiving, and pack a punch." —New York Magazine
“[S]ublime… With her signature unembellished prose, Tuck often writes about women whose prospects are limited by their historical era and choice of mate… [in] sentences stark with circumspection and glistening with clarity.” —Shelf Awareness
“Tuck reveals grace in unexpected places as she exposes the uneasy turns and harsh truths of her characters’ journeys.” —Booklist
“Tuck probes the gulf between expectations and reality as well as between outward appearances and internal disquiet in this collection of four short stories and a novella. . . . Tuck’s restrained and elegant stories deceptively carry a deep emotional heft.” —Publishers Weekly
“Lean, intriguing, formally innovative prose . . . . National Book Award winner Tuck turns her attention to Emily Brontë's gothic, psychologically riveting Wuthering Heights in Heathcliff Redux, the novella at the center of this collection.’’ —Kirkus Reviews
"[P]owerful... An earlier reviewer has said that Tuck is "a genius with moments." That's far from all she is, but yes, tons of them in a book that weighs ounces." —Shawangunk Journal
Praise for Sisters
“Another minimalist masterpiece, a tight knot of a novel filled with intertextual puzzles, pathos, and happy rewards.”—Boston Globe
“Elegant, raw, and powerful... Magnificent enough to be reread and renewed.”―Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)
“Masterfully detailed and elegant in all its parts.”―Kirkus Reviews
“Another wonderful Tuck prism.”—Shelf Awareness
Praise for The Double Life of Liliane
“Intriguing and intelligent… Exciting in its sweep, ambition, and conceptual intricacy.”—Boston Globe
“Enlivening.”—New Yorker
“Intriguing... intricate.”—Entertainment Weekly
“A mosaic of storytelling that is both poetic and absorbing.”—NPR.com
09/01/2019
National Book Award winner Tuck continues doing what she does best, offering ice pick-incisive studies of human relationships. In the title novella, a married woman reads Emily Brontë's classic Wuthering Heights as she becomes dangerously drawn to her own Heathcliff. The additional four stories range from suddenly remembered violence that happened long ago in a New York park to a photograph spookily limning the connections among a group of friends.
2019-11-10
National Book Award winner Tuck (The Double Life of Liliane, 2015, etc.) turns her attention to Emily Brontë's gothic, psychologically riveting Wuthering Heights in Heathcliff Redux, the novella at the center of this collection.
It's 1963 in rural Virginia, and the unnamed narrator, who's a mother and the wife of a cattle farmer, is rereading Wuthering Heights when she finds herself inexplicably drawn to a morally compromised man named Cliff. Although warned that Cliff is "too good-looking for his own good," "reckless," and untrustworthy, the narrator falls hard. The story of their affair unfolds as collage: Interspersed with passages from Wuthering Heights, snippets of Brontë's biography, and critical commentary on the novel, the narrator reports in short dispassionate sections on the places she and Cliff make love, on Cliff's lies, and on her husband's affair, among other things. Places or things that arise in scenes from Wuthering Heights or the narrator's own story (Rehoboth Beach, cuckoos, Boeuf Bourguignon) are sometimes glossed on the next page, underscoring the extent to which facts are not necessarily truths. Though the narrator is looking back (much of the secondary material was published 30 years after the affair), hindsight doesn't help her understand why she allowed Cliff to become the force of so much destruction. Instead, the human heart remains a mystery, which seems to be the point. This may disappoint readers who expect fiction to explore the reasons for characters' actions or the novella to shed new light on Brontë's novel (or vice versa). The final four stories are both stranger and more conventional. The characters do things surprising (like carrying a dead swan home) and shocking (murdering a teenage girl), and yet the past always catches up with the present, emphasizing the age-old belief—and plot of much fiction—that you can't escape the consequences of your actions.
Lean, intriguing, formally innovative prose that will satisfy some readers while leaving others hungry for meatier plots.
