A debut novel about discovering desire.
It’s the eve of the millennium, and Ina is an almost middle-aged academic who’s trying to finish a book on the playwright Eugene O’Neill, which will launch her career as an English professor. She’s mostly happily married to Simon, with whom she has terrific adventures around New York City, though not-so-terrific sex. Enter Jack, a composer Ina meets at a party, who kisses her on the subway platform even though he knows she’s married. Friedman’s novel is not about whether Ina will have an affair—the very first lines announce that her “whole life turned upside down” when she “discovered sex at the age of forty-one”—but how much she will risk to keep seeing Jack. Reading this novel is like watching a car careen over a cliff in slow motion, as Ina blows by writing deadlines, disappoints the chair of the English department where she’s a visiting professor, lies to her husband, and fulfills Jack’s ever weirder sexual fantasies. (In one scene, he confesses he’s turned on by necrophilia, and though initially repelled, Ina eventually pretends to be dead.) “The heart wants what it wants,” Emily Dickinson once wrote to a friend. Jack is a brilliant character, as unabashed as Ina is repressed, an unapologetic male chauvinist who smokes, peeps on his neighbors, enjoys porn, and can’t quite get it up, among his other winning qualities. And yet Ina finds him absolutely irresistible. Neither raucous nor raunchy—Ina is way too prim a protagonist—this is a well-mannered and funny novel about what happens when the heart rebels against the mind, and the body demands that “what was growling up from deep within you didn’t deserve to be ignored.”
A sexy tease of a novel for the buttoned-up crowd.
