Poet Hustvedt's first novel is unabashedly cerebral, a disturbing
and disarming fiction that explores the mysteries of identity. It's
a postmodernist puzzle with a queasy eroticism and hints of
perversion, and owes much to the work of Beckett, DeLillo, and her
husband, Paul Auster. But Hustvedt adds to their explorations in
silence and unspeakability her distinctly feminine voice: innocent,
intimate, victimized. These four related narratives circle around
the life of Iris Vegan, a distraught and hypersensitive graduate
student in literature at Columbia. A beautiful, blue-eyed blond
from the Midwest, she's continually at the mercy of others, mostly
men who shroud themselves in mystery. Iris's first story finds her
working as an assistant to a strange writer, a collector of women's
discarded objects, who asks her to record her observations so that
he may reconstruct their previous owners. After playing this
bizarre Scheherazade, Iris is unalterably changed, but not as
dramatically as in her second narrative, in which a photographer's
portrait of her proves an invasion of her privacy. Her boyfriend at
the time admits that cruelty makes him "feel more alive." As her
personality begins to disintegrate, Iris (in the third piece)
admits to minor hallucinations, which land her in the hospital
whacked out on Thorazine and tormented by one of her roommates, a
withered old woman who also desires her in some strange way. To
demonstrate further that "distortion is part of desire," Iris then
alters herself, taking on the role of a brutal boy, a role she has
adopted from a German novella she co-translates with her
professor/lover. Roaming the city in drag, she indulges her
fantasies until the much older professor catches her in disguise.
In playful "blindness," she loses all sense of self but also turns
out to be as mysterious as all her tormentors, so that we wonder,
just who is playing with whom? Hustvedt brings her clark urban
landscape to life with her camera eye and Iris's tenacious,
Midwestern common sense - the perfect balance to all the
existential weirdness. (Kirkus Reviews)
Iris Vegan, a graduate student living alone and impoverished in New
York, encounters four strong characters who fascinate and in
different ways subordinate her: an inscrutable urban recluse who
employs her to record the possessions of a murdered woman; a
photographer whose eerie portrait of Iris takes on a life of its
own; an old woman in hospital who tries to claim a remnant of the
ailing Iris; and a professor she has an affair with. An exploration
of female identity in an age when the old definitions - as some
man's daughter/wife/mother - no longer apply, fuelled with
eroticism and a sense of menace.
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