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Narcissus Ascending comes to us with exquisite references from uncompromisingly literary writers like Margot Livesey, Andrea Barrett, and Claire Messud. And Karen McKinnon's debut
is literary: she is working with Big Themes like art and friendship and victimhood. But while her themes are big, her characters are dispiritingly small. Her story is cinematic in its simplicity. As narrator Becky prepares for her first art show at a downtown gallery, she and her three annoyingly petty, self-involved best friends are haunted by a woman named Callie, a drama queen who has, one way or another, burned the lot of them. They hatch a plan to invite Callie to the opening and confront her with her sins. The elegant plainness of the plot is countered by McKinnon's wildly mannered writing. The gallery is
a gleaming oasis propping up a stillscuzzy tenement...my favorite kind of space, whitepainted brick walls, whitewashed woodslatted floors, lots of light streaming in, good visibility from the street to snag the walkins, the furs from Jersey who slum it on Saturday afternoons, while it's still light out, still safe.
The entire book is written in this aggressively jejune, poetical tone; it seems to be written by, for, and about the extremely young. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just a very limited thing. The title is meant to describe both Callie and the narrator; in the end, it seems to describe this entire navel-gazing project.
--Claire Dederer
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From Publishers Weekly
McKinnon's debut offers a tightly focused group portrait of 20-something friends in Manhattan's East Village. Becky is an artist who turns photos of herself into collages; she's in love with Hugh, an accountant, and her best friend is Dahlia, a dancer. Erstwhile actor Max lurks around the edges of this makeshift family. Becky narrates, but it's Callie beautiful, treacherous, inscrutable and absent who is the novel's truest subject. The fast-paced story follows Dahlia's plan to finally break away from the femme fatale who has wounded them all, by inviting her to the opening of Becky's first show, where Callie will see them all happy and triumphant. Francine Prose gave McKinnon a New Voice Fiction Award for this work as a novel-in-progress, and the book's first half makes it easy to see why. The writing is exquisitely economical, each word a precise fit with the next: "His lips are slightly parted, the color of my chair. The pink velvet needs recovering. I like coffee and I'm careless." McKinnon also reproduces the overlapping rhythms of speech among old friends authentically, and Becky has a pleasingly dry sense of humor. But as the novel spirals into a revenge scenario, the story devolves into junior high histrionics, including an extravagant faked suicide attempt and elaborately unhealthy sex. By novel's end, the promise of its beginning the precision, the wit, the emotional clarity is overwhelmed by adolescent melodrama.
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