Revenge

The unsettling confluence of life and art is at the center of Revenge, Mary Morris' latest literary thriller. Shaping her narrative around the uneasy friendship of two women, Morris weaves a powerful tale of manipulation, exploitation, and admiration. Loretta Partlow is a world famous novelist who has built a career on drawing from real life experience, putting the people she meets into her books, often barely disguised. Now living in Hartford, Connecticut, Loretta has built a comfortable, and salubrious life for herself and for Patrick her less successful writer husband. Loretta, however, can't face her own dark stories. Haunted by the failures of Sean, her wayward and truant son, Loretta feels free to feed on the stories of others. It is in Andrea Geller, a talented artist, who is currently tenured at Heartwood College, that the author sets her sights on, seeing a powerful new story, and a possible new bestseller. Reeling from the death of her father, Andrea is convinced that he drove off the bridge that night, overly medicated and mentally out of control. She blames Elena, her stepmother, who has so manipulated the family that she even achieved in exorcising Andrea and her brother Robby, out of the family inheritance. Bitter and resentful, Andrea is more than willing to tell Loretta her life story, in part to expose Elena, but also to exorcise the ghosts of her past. In Loretta, Andrea has found a willing listener. For both Andrea and Loretta, the act of listening and also their respective creative processes, the artist and the writer, are analogous to therapy - that is, it focuses on the self, and specifically on dealing with, and hopefully resolving, Andrea's intensely personal problems. Loretta is a woman who is easily old enough to be Andrea's mother, who has become her friend, and along the way her confessor. And it is as though Andrea could not be absolved until she has told Loretta all. She feels that she and the novelist have been thrown together for a reason. Not just for Andrea's plan to get back at Elena, but also for something even more, something neither of them can know. While Loretta registers shock at Andrea's story, calling it disturbing and saying, "it almost makes no sense," she's secretly plotting and maneuvering - the reader is never sure what she's planning. In actuality, Loretta is something akin to "a diesel engine, a gorgon, and a devourer of whatever gets in her way." Andrea - for her part - almost revels in being pitied; this is what Andrea had been counting on; she knows what Loretta thinks when she sees her. Morris has crafted a seductively cautionary tale that carefully skewers middle class college life, whilst also highlighting the artistic pretensions of her two principle protagonists. The story is a skillful exploration of the dark undercurrents of deception, artistic longing, and betrayal, the plot deftly heightening the main characters journey into moral ambiguity, exposing their deepest insecuri

A young artist, hoping for tenure at Heartwood College in Connecticut. A well-known and much acclaimed novelist who lives in the neighborhood near the college, Heartwood Springs. The artist, Andrea Geller, is consumed with her father's death, sure her stepmother played some part in it, if only one of negligence, the night he drove off a bridge, overmedicated, and lingered in a coma for two years before he expired. During that time, Andrea visited every day, but her stepmother, Elena's, visits become ever more sporadic, until they ceased altogether. At first only acquaintances, Loretta and Andrea become friends and Andrea discloses her belief that Elena was partly responsible for her father's death. Loretta, a consummate writer, seems sincerely interested in Andrea's story and the two draw closer. The author encourages Andrea's work as well, a series of paintings, all of her father's home in Shallow Lake, the repetitious renderings evolving into an artistic statement and an emotional canvas of Andrea's internal struggle. Andrea's life is untidy, unfocused since her father's death. A cardiologist, his presence looms large in her imagination and her work, as her painting resolves issues she cannot acknowledge, let alone confront. Loretta's interest serves as a catalyst, triggering long-buried memories and emotional scars. Andrea wants Loretta to know her story, slowly forming a plan, an intricate web that will help her find closure, but who will be using who? Morris takes the twisted memory of family trauma and fashions it into an intriguing drama shaped by conflict, obsession, guilt and grief. Couched in a simple friendship, Andrea and Loretta's relationship is beautifully complicated, giving the novel a natural tension that portends a difficult resolution. Carefully subtle, the author intimates without exposing, setting up her protagonist for a surprising exercise in frustration. Morris reveals the nature of intimacy and obsession, the selfish motivations that impose burdens that cannot be sustained. Andrea learns the nature of friendship and her own capacity for self-delusion. Both writer and artist exist on the edge of their interior worlds, where the creative process draws from life. The natural boundaries, once breeched, have no defense against the urgency of creation. What is grist for Andrea's artistic endeavors and growing body of work is also vulnerable to poaching. This self-involved and socially stunted artist must face the consequences of her actions and be prepared to pay the price of indiscretion. Luan Gaines/2005.

Excellently crafted! The characters in "Revenge" are so believably written, you NEED to know what happens next. I wanted to follow them past their appearance in this book, even though the book ends at the perfect spot. A book you can't put down, and one you'll think about long after you've finished. I think it would make a good choice for a book discussion group.

I love the neat inevitability of this story, how doomed the heroine, Andrea, feels from the get-go, how complicit she is in her fate, and yet how full of fresh promise she emerges in the very last pages. Reeling out a taut line of tension between her scheming characters, Morris snags the reader. She also does a masterful job of establishing the complex role that Andrea's art, her painting, plays in her life. The paintings themselves, a feverish outpouring as Andrea plots her revenge, are rendered brilliantly in Morris's prose; even now as I recall them the images spring to mind as if I'd seen the paintings in the artist's studio, rather than had them described. Love, friendship, solace, stability -- all are elusive for Andrea. But her fierce devotion to her work, and its dense weave of meaning, sustain her throughout. I love that. This is a terrific book.

I picked up Revenge on a day when I felt I barely had time to brush my teeth and ended up staying up late to finish this compelling novel. The heroine, an artist named Andrea, is immediately sympathetic and as I turned the pages I became increasingly absorbed in her struggles to come to terms with her father's death and with her own precarious situation, teaching at a small college. When she becomes friends with her neighbour, a famous writer, I hoped for the best and feared the worst. Neither quite come true and that, for me, is one of the most impressive feats of this elegant book. I never knew what was going to happen next but whatever did happen seemed both surprising and just right. Highly recommended.