Cast In Doubt - Softcover

Tillman, Lynne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451636660 ISBN 13: 9781451636666

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2010

Synopsis

Set in an eccentric community of expatriates living in Crete in 1975, Cast in Doubt is the story of Horace, an American gay man who writes mystery novels, and Helen, a secretive young woman he befriends. When Helen suddenly disappears, Horace's obsessive quest to find her reveals the nature of mystery and the uncertainties of his life. Tillman is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Motion Sickness and Haunted Houses.

About this title

About the Author:

Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, two collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novel "No Lease on Life "and her second essay collection "What Would Lynne Tillman Do? "were nominated, respectively, for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction (1998) and in Criticism (2014). She is Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as an Arts Writers grant from the Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital (2015).

From Kirkus Reviews:

``We were a ragtag band of inhibited outsiders, each a secret and keeping secrets from the others. And ourselves, I suspect.'' That's how the narrator of this puzzle novel by Tillman (Haunted Houses, 1987; Motion Sickness, 1991) describes the expatriate community that surrounds him on Crete. His name is Horace (or so we're led to believe until we're told in the closing pages, ``Change the name and you are the subject of the story''). He's an elderly homosexual living with a young Greek gigolo, and a writer of crime novels. When Horace develops a strange, largely platonic fixation on a new arrival--a pretty girl named Helen, who, rumor has it, prowled the streets of downtown Manhattan like a black cat and now picks up sailors at the harbor--his penchant for sleuthing comes in handy. The girl disappears, and Horace is compelled to search for her among a band of gypsies in the south of the island. All he turns up is her diary, full of quotes from Patti Smith and odd jottings like ``OEDIPUS WRECKS.'' It disappoints him, but later his old buddy from Harvard, Gwen, enlightens him by explaining that in Helen he was looking for himself. ``How tiresome'' he finds it--that he has never really understood anyone because he can't see outside himself. Unlike Horace's, the author's vision is clear--she's produced a handful of sharply drawn secondary characters and a very interior narrative voice that teasingly commands. But she backs away from sense and message by riddling with matters ontological, resulting in a novel that is by turns frustrating and amusing, if slight. Beach reading for the John Hawkes set. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1451636660
• ISBN 13: 9781451636666
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240