★ 06/20/2016
The narrator of Alison’s (The Love-Artist) wonderful novel, J, lives alone in the paradise of a Miami Beach high-rise condo. J spends most of her days going to the pool, working on translating (or “transmuting”) Ovid’s stories, sitting on her balcony, and watching her neighbors in a building across the way. She’s been contacting some of her various lovers from the past, whom she refers to as “Sir Gold,” “The Devil,” and other monikers—but none of them lead to anything serious. As she contemplates retiring from love for good, she cares for her aging cat, Buster, and a duck stranded on a traffic median. She befriends her enigmatic and troubled neighbors on the floor above her and becomes further and further entangled with them. Maybe it’s due to the oppressive heat or her active imagination, but Ovid and Miami begin to blur: she sees Ovid’s girls (as the narrator refers to them) in the trees, people who transform, and symbols everywhere. J faces a certain ennui: she is alone, she lacks a mate, yet her inner life is a vivid struggle to find happiness, to connect with the world outside her apartment. Yet how can she live without pleasure? With echoes of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, Alison has forged a haunting and emotionally precise portrait, a beautiful reminder that solitude does not equal loneliness. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Sept.)
Praise for Nine Island
The Guardian, Best Summer Books 2018
One of Publishers Weekly's 25 Best Books of 2016 in Fiction
“Alison’s evocation of J’s interior life feels honest, and it dramatizes the social invisibility of women who live alone past a certain age. . . .[Her] novel treats with humor . . . existential questions about solitude and the inevitability of transformation. As our circumstances and bodies change, as we inflict and cause pain, as our lives expand and contract, what of the self endures? Nine Island testifies to the fragility of a life that can vanish from sight, and to the sturdiness of one that maintains the capacity for change.” —Alix Ohlin, New York Times Book Review
“The free form of Alison’s prose will keep you on your toes, and her meditations on the absence and presence of love will touch your heart.” —Estelle Tang, “The 11 Best Books for September 2016,” ELLE
“Nine Island could be fun for a book club, though one with only female members. J, having just suffered a romantic rejection, retreats to her glass aerie on one of the Miami Beach islands, thinking about renouncing men forever. ‘Three decades of wandering among men. I have to ask myself, for what? Who made them the trees, the stars?" —Sarah Murdoch, Toronto Star
“The more or less constant delights of Jane Alison’s latest novel bubble up out of a story that is, incongruously, bleak. It is quite an achievement, a comic novel about a woman of a certain age as she contemplates embracing a not–altogether–unwelcome spinsterhood. . . . There is a wonderful observation . . . on every page.” —Chauncey Mabe, Miami Herald
“Wonderful. . . . With echoes of Molly Bloom's soliloquy and Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea, Alison has forged a haunting and emotionally precise portrait, a beautiful reminder that solitude does not equal loneliness.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“I can’t stop thinking about this weird, wonderful book that follows a woman known only as 'J.' as she considers life on the cusp of sexual viability while living in a Miami Beach high rise. J. is (like her creator, who is also Director of Creative Writing at The University of Virginia) a serious scholar of Ovid, and The Metamorphoses plays an important, but far from stuffy, role in the plot. Should be required reading for all women over age 18.” —Bethanne Patrick, Literary Hub's 5 Great Books to Read Amid the September Onslaught
“Candid, contemplative, hilarious, and affecting. . . . It’s also quite a bit stranger than one might expect, in the best possible sense: allusive and elusive, it conflates its narrator’s restless mind and its louche, peculiar setting to produce an effect that’s vibrant, slippery, erotically charged, and slightly menacing.” —Martin Seay, author of The Mirror Thief, in Electric Literature
“A cerebral exploration of self, Nine Island explores oneness and whether it is, or isn't, an acceptable ending.” —Ilana Masad, Read it Forward's Favorite Reads of September
“Earlier this year, we listed 99 books everyone should read. If you've somehow chewed through this list already, we recommend Nine Island by Jane Alison.” —Harper's BAZAAR
“This immersive, cerebral novel centers on J, a woman teetering on the balance between the concrete, sometimes grim responsibilities of her daily life and an equally urgent personal dilemma: should she 'retire' from love and romance?. . . . Evocative, sad, at times funny, and never completely without hope, Nine Island studies what it means to be alone later in life.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Nine Island is a crackling incantation, brittle and brilliant and hot and sad and full of sideways humor that devastates and illuminates all at once.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“Nine Island is a nerve–jangling book full of the giddy wit of the emotionally starving, the unfulfillable desire of being in love with being in love, and the weirdly sexy conversation of souls in free fall.” —David Shields, author of Reality Hunger and How Literature Saved My Life
“This deceptively slim narrative, as witty and mercurial as any tale from Ovid, circles deftly around love and desire, pain and death, joy and solitude and the relentless nature of change. I fell into it as into water, transformed by the magic of Alison's prose.” —Andrea Barrett, author of The Air We Breathe and Archangel
11/15/2016
J lives in a glass high-rise on one of Miami Beach's alluring Venetian Islands and is seriously thinking of giving up men. In midlife herself, she's seen her now ailing mother flop at many relationships, and she's just returned from a visit with Sir Gold (as she dubs him), an old flame who had seemed interested in reigniting their passion but after a month decides it's not to be and rather casually dismisses her. Meanwhile, she's translating Ovid, which leads not only to some absorbingly sensuous passages but also sharp, lyrical reflections on physical intimacy and the nature of female sexuality as both need and burden; here, we see mythic characters fleeing violation of body and self. Yet as a friend says, "If you retire from love,…then you retire from life." VERDICT Novelist/memoirist Alison, also a translator of Ovid's stories of sexual transformation, has written an autobiographical novel-cum-meditation that many readers, and not just women, will find intriguing. Passion matters, and who doesn't contemplate somehow moving forward?
2016-06-14
This immersive, cerebral novel centers on J, a woman teetering on the balance between the concrete, sometimes grim responsibilities of her daily life and an equally urgent personal dilemma: should she "retire" from love and romance?Memoirist, translator, and novelist Alison (The Sisters Antipodes, 2009, etc.) sets a surreal scene: a Miami beachfront apartment building, a "musty old Love Boat," where the structure and many of its residents are in the process of death and decay. J lives on the 21st floor in a box-shaped flat with cork floors and mirrored walls. Her building, a large block consisting of smaller blocks, is mirrored by the building across the way, where she witnesses scenes of human connection and disconnection, innocent and otherwise. Everyone in this book is known only by their first initial or their role, such as "my mother" or "Par-T-Boy," contributing to the sense of disconnection J and the reader experience together. In her cube, J embarks on a project similar to Alison's own book Change Me (2014), translating sex stories by Ovid into English. As she works, she considers giving up on sex and romantic life after the end of a 10-year marriage and a tour of exes, culminating in one month spent with "Sir Gold," the one who got away, who doesn't want her back anymore. Her intellectual life is punctuated by obligatory dates with local suitors, an ailing mother, an incontinent cat, and a newly formed friendship with a neighbor couple. She ventures out to swim laps in the building's hourglass-shaped pool and walk the beach, where she feeds and attempts to rescue a wounded duck. While narrating her own story, J acknowledges she's speaking to an audience, but her stories don't form an epic tale; rather, they are a series of short chapters, elliptical dips into and out of experiences past and present. Evocative, sad, at times funny, and never completely without hope, a story that studies what it means to be alone later in life.
