A Biagmist's Daugher - Alice McDermott

I cannot describe how much I loved Charming Billy . I love sad books. I love dark books. I love reading any writer who handles the language well so Alice McDermott is a safe bet most of the time.

ABD is about 20 something Elizabeth, who works for a vanity press in NYC. She spends her days filling the heads of would be writers with big dreams of best sellers she never read. It's her job to get them to believe that despite the rejections they've received to date, there is an audience for their work and if they just get it out there - on their own dime of course. She whips em up into a frenzy and then cashes their check. It's a pretty morally bankrupt job, enough so that even her assistant doesn't want to be promoted to it. Add to that Elizabeth's hopeless nights in an empty bed ever since she swore off sex without love over a year ago and you have a woman in need of something.

Enter Tupper Daniels, author extraordinaire. He bring his novel to Elizabeth to get it published. He's so charasmatic she almost reads his book, but in the end settles for a basic skimming just to get the contract signed. The next day he seduces her. Not just sexually, but intellectually as well. His novel is unfinished. It's about a bigamist from his hometown but since he doesn't know what happened to him he doesn't have an ending to the book. Oddly enough, Elizabeth's father spent his life traveling, so much so that she's convinced he was a bigamist, what are the odds?

It turns out the odds don't matter. The rest of the novel plays itself out as Elizabeth re-examines her memories of her father and family experience in an attempt to help Tupper finish his novel. She becomes far more compelling than the whiny, morally bankrupt girl we first meet although no less mercenary and still a tad melodramatic. Tupper for his part is the self-obsessed would be writer you can like even as you hate him. This is McDermott's first novel, I think, and you can see how her style has developed and grown over time. And this novel leaves the same kind of pang, dead center in your chest that Charming Billy does. It's not as pronounced and the recovery is quick but the impact is still there.