From Library Journal
Hustvedt follows up the success of The Blindfold (LJ 3/15/92), portions of which appeared in The Best Short Stories of 1991 (LJ 10/1/91), with a riveting portrayal of a young woman in a small Midwestern town, cafe waitress Lily Dahl, who resembles a dark Marilyn Monroe. From her window, Lily watches Ed, a New York Jewish artist, as much seduced by her own eroticism as his. Ed paints private pictures of "people who looked straight out at you, but who were alone at the same time." Hustvedt's poignant depiction of the friendships and loneliness of small town life is reminiscent of Carson McCullers. Lily evolves from an unformed girl to a compelling woman who knows that her hope is her toughness. Rich characterization makes up for an initially slow-moving narrative, which gathers momentum and culminates in the spectacular demise of Lily's eccentric childhood friend. Recommended for all literary collections.?Molly Gorman, San Marino, Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Hustvedt's second outing abandons the cerebral regions of postmodernism (The Blindfold, 1992) and turns to the familiar melodramas of small-town gothic. Nineteen-year-old Lilly Dahl lives in Webster, Minnesota, rooms over the main-street cafe where she works as waitress, and has ambitions of becoming an actress--she's learning, in fact, the role of Hermia for a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The dream-world of Shakespeare's play and the events here befalling the hapless Lilly are often dovetailed neatly enough by Hustvedt, but at the same time her heroine's credibility-stretching tale of perversion, mystery, and obsession groans with the familiar. The seeming start of things was the long-ago killing of a woman named Helen Bodler, whose farmer husband is said by some to have buried her alive. Waitress Lilly serves breakfast daily to Helen's now-grown sons, the demented and unwashed bachelor farmers Frank and Dick, and to another distant relative of the dead Helen's, the eccentric loner Martin Petersen, ex-childhood playmate of Lilly herself. When eerie things start happening, then, there is no dearth of suspects--excluding neither Mabel Wasley, Lilly's 78- year-old neighbor who types all night and has secrets aplenty up her sleeve, nor Ed Shapiro, the handsome artist and out-of-towner who knows all about opera, works on his mysterious canvases all night--and steals Lilly's susceptible heart. When new murders and spectral sightings (of Lilly herself, no less) are reported, our feisty heroine turns fearless gumshoe (``She froze and held her breath. . . . But Lily knew that she was going to lurch headlong into whatever was waiting for her''), managing finally not only to expose all but to play a cool hand when Ed Shapiro at last offers to waft her away to New York City. Mystery, murder, and provincial caricatures, all in a readable but curiously dusty mix from a writer whose aims seemed higher the first time around. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
. . . a promisingly eerie ambiance--but one that ultimately proves more stylish than substantial. -- Salon, Megan Harlan
About the Author
Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English literature and is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, The Blindfold, and The Summer Without Men, as well as a growing body of nonfiction, including Living, Thinking, Looking, A Plea for Eros,and Mysteries of the Rectangle,and an interdisciplinary investigation of the body and mind in The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She has given lectures on artists and theories of art at the Prado, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2011, she delivered the thirty-ninth annual Freud Lecture in Vienna. She lives in Brooklyn.
