Publishers Weekly
★ 05/27/2024
Anthony (Enter the Aardvark) examines a fraying marriage in her sensational latest. Kathleen Beckett, a former college tennis champion, lives with her husband, Virgil, and two children in the suburbs of 1950s Newark, Del. One Sunday, Kathleen tells Virgil to take the children to church without her. The narrative spans the rest of the day and alternates between Kathleen’s and Virgil’s points of view, gradually revealing the sources of their tension. It turns out Virgil recently ended an affair with a woman named Imogene Monson, and, as the day progresses, Kathleen pieces together the truth while Virgil contends with Imogene’s attempt to win him back. Meanwhile, Virgil’s father digs up dirt on Kathleen, and hints to her that he knows about her affair with her high school tennis instructor. More juicy revelations and surprising twists ensue as Anthony unspools each spouse’s side of the story, and suspense mounts as the clock ticks toward their reunion at home. What makes this exceptional, however, are the distinctive details, such as a tennis strategy called “the most,” inspired by the bombing of a bridge in Czechoslovakia during WWI, in which a player lures their opponent toward the net and then hits a devastating passing shot. Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (July)
From the Publisher
An exquisite, taut literary mousetrap—this is a tale of sport in every sense of the word, of game and play, winning and losing, strategy and choice. If the secret of jazz, our male protagonist’s hidden passion, is the notes they don’t play, then the secret of this aching novella is the words the characters don’t say to each other. Jessica Anthony’s writing is a thunderous, polyphonic music all its own.”—ALISSA NUTTING, author of MADE FOR LOVE and TAMPA
"The Most achieves the impossible: it says something new about marriage. In this thrilling novel, Anthony's genius for structural and chronological invention is grounded in sensory richness and the most vividly idiosyncratic characters I’ve encountered in a while. This is a 21st century literary classic waiting to happen.”—KATE CHRISTENSEN, author of THE GREAT MAN
“Jessica Anthony’s The Most is a brilliant and startling domestic fable of longing. The novel captures a haunting unrest at the core of midcentury American life, treating its aimlessly striving characters with a stern caress of grace. The Most is a novel of ruthless beauty. I read it in one perfect sitting.”—ISLE MCELROY, author of PEOPLE COLLIDE
“With Enter the Aardvark Jessica Anthony proved herself to be one of the most inventive writers working today. That book should have prepared me for her ingenious new novella, The Most, but somehow it didn’t. Trust me, though. The Most is a must.”—RICHARD RUSSO, author of EMPIRE FALLS and the NORTH BATH Trilogy
“Sensational…exceptional…Readers won’t want to put this down.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review
The Most charges the air like a thunderclap when a married couple reckons with their past and the masks they hide behind. You will race to find out who they are and who they might become. Jessica Anthony’s riveting novel is stellar. She has quickly become one of my favorite writers.—TOMAS Q. MORIN, author of MACHETE
“Can the secrets and misdeeds of a marriage be survived?... Anthony’s sharply focused portrait of seemingly average lives in midcentury America reveals the complexities of those lives in the course of one balmy day. A novella packing all the imagery and storytelling power of a novel.”—KIRKUS, Starred Review
A vaguely disenchanted midcentury housewife enters her swimming pool on a warm November day — and decides not to leave. A quick but psychologically acute read by the author of “Enter the Aardvark” with a vivid sense of time and place (not just the pool).—BOSTON GLOBE
