Publishers Weekly
06/24/2024
Newbound debuts with the underwhelming story of a 20-something woman’s failure to launch. Elsa has recently moved back from New York City to her parents’ house in the Hudson Valley, having been dumped and fired by the artist couple she was sleeping with and working for. Now, Elsa spends a lot of time scrolling through social media and roaming around her small hometown, trying to shake her feelings for the unnamed couple. Eventually she takes a hostess job at a restaurant, where she becomes enamored with a celebrity guest (details suggest Timothee Chalamet) and his companions who are in town for a theater festival. Soon her attention shifts to the actor’s friend, an androgynous person named Sam. The novel shows glimmers of life when Sam enters the picture, taking Elsa to a swimming hole and later to a party for the festival, but the first half is bogged down with overwritten and repetitive depictions of Elsa’s feelings. Here’s hoping Newbound’s next outing will make better use of her intriguing themes. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
A shockingly modern and honest debut about isolation and longing in our age of screens. Newbound’s precise style feels fresh and bold. I was mesmerized.”
–JULIA MAY JONAS, author of Vladimir
“Misrecognition casts a spell in coolly detached prose, brilliantly plunging us into the porous membrane between the social and the parasocial. I was blown away by this singular and mesmerizing debut.”
—ANTOINE WILSON, author of Mouth to Mouth
“An astonishingly assured debut. Every interaction is like a mirage, at once familiar and estranging, and in Newbound’s enthralling novel we are all, every one of us, actors.”
—SARAH BLAKLEY-CARTWRIGHT, author of Alice Sadie Celine
“Numbed by heartbreak, lost in a peculiarly American loneness, the protagonist of Madison Newbound’s haunting novel brings new understandings of identity and sex to old experiences of melancholy and obsession. I’ve never read anything that captures so vividly the distinct texture of desire, at once feverish and vacant, engendered by the infinite scroll of online life. Misrecognition is a brave and blazingly smart debut.”
–GARTH GREENWELL, author of Cleanness
“Sleek and sexy, assured yet searching, Misrecognition so perfectly captures the highs and lows of intimacy in the digital age, the loneliness of always being connected but also the soul-rearranging elation of finding someone who shows you to yourself.”
–MICHELLE HART, author of We Do What We Do In the Dark
Kirkus Reviews
2024-04-18
A depressed young woman attempts to form her identity through parasocial relationships, one of which she manifests into existence.
Elsa has been dumped by a chic older couple, her bosses and lovers of a year and a half. Heartbroken and out of a job, she moves back in with her parents in her sleepy hometown. The family watches an unnamed film together, which the discerning reader will quickly identify as Call Me by Your Name (2018), and Elsa finds that “she had been moved,” deeply, by the performance of the young actor—which would be, you guessed it, Timothée Chalamet. Elsa becomes obsessed with Chalamet, who’s referred to only as “the actor-character,” and in an extraordinary coincidence, she sees him at her town’s local coffee shop days later. He’s starring in a play in the town’s annual theater festival, and Elsa devotes herself to meek attempts at grabbing his attention from outside his retinue of haute creatives and hangers-on. Her life becomes a blur of hostessing at the local restaurant, stalking “the man and the woman” and various influencers on social media, smoking on the roof outside her childhood bedroom, and—briefly and unspectacularly—encountering the actor. Over time, her interests shift from the actor to one of his companions: a dark-haired person named Sam. When Sam finally notices her, Elsa must reckon with who she is, and who she could become, after hitting rock bottom. This debut is realistic in its portrayal of a listless young woman lacking direction, and some readers will find many moments to relate to. The endless repetition of actions and thought patterns that fill the first two-thirds of the book mirror the monotony of Elsa’s days, but they quickly begin to drag. We move through Elsa’s life as she does, sleepily, watching her emotions instead of feeling them. The style is formal and detached, which can feel stilted at times, but there are lines that shine with wisdom: “She wondered if progress or ‘healing’…was merely a flattening out, a ridding of affect so that one might remain placid in the face of almost anything, a pebble worn down to its impenetrable core.”
Another slightly edgy “sad girl” novel, distinct in its inclusion of a nonbinary love interest and a celebrity cameo.
