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A Novel
by Claire Oshetsky
Book Reviewed by:An exuberant, brutally hilarious novel about a young woman's insatiable quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way.
It's 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be working at a steady job and married to her Drew, a man who says he loves her. Celia's contentment with her little life is shattered, though, when a woman she knows from work is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die for love—or to kill for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full awareness that each breath is bringing her closer to her last?
Before Celia knows it, her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. Suddenly she's playing hooky from work and searching for a love tryst of her very own. She's practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range and thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband's ear. It's all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.
Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir exploring obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life.
One
The Cliffhanger
I didn't mourn for Vivienne Bianco. I didn't know her. I knew how she died, though, because Randall Smiley told me the whole terrible story. I couldn't get Randall's story out of my head. I was never again going to let myself forget how each breath was bringing me closer to my final breath. How would I live differently? For sure I didn't want to live the same life I'd been living. I craved revolutionary changes in my life. Violent changes, even. I felt like I was exercising a new muscle in my body. My body began to conform to my new way of thinking. Each day my body grew more loose-limbed and intuitive. It grew more sensitive to things. Trivial things at first, like the way my clothes felt against my skin as I walked along. Then larger things, too, and larger-than-large things—profound things, even—like the boundless sky at dusk when work was done. A slant-sun would be making its way toward the horizon, and the east-west roads would be orange and glowing. ...
Nineteen-year-old Celia is gentle and naive, and her older husband, Drew, likes her that way. The pair met two years earlier, in 1972, while her mother was dying in the hospital where he worked as a scrub tech, and Celia went straight from dependent teenager to bride, never having to fend for herself. Her one bit of self-sufficiency is her job in the billing department of a phone company, but Drew doesn't like it if she works too late. Drew doesn't like a lot of things, actually. Celia doesn't see him as abusive—she thinks he's just keeping her under control. What makes this book so delightful to read is watching Celia come into her true self. Over the course of the narrative, she grows bolder, more confident, and even a bit unhinged. One gets the sense that she is recovering her earlier, childhood self, before she was socialized to be a well-behaved lady. Because the novel is narrated by an older Celia, there is a comfortable sense from the beginning that her story is not going to end tragically. And so the reader gets to follow along with anticipation, knowing that all of the ups and downs, even the most dramatic ones, will lead Celia to her well-deserved happy ending...continued
Full Review
(736 words)
(Reviewed by Jillian Bell).
Ainslie Hogarth, author of Motherthing
In Evil Genius, Claire Oshetsky gives us the dark, brutal, and often hilarious voice of a character we see often, but so rarely get to hear from—the woman in a mid-20th century potboiler. Campy and exciting; surreal and sad. This is another stunner from a truly original writer. Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
An enthralling, sharply funny, and unsettling read about abuse, murder, and desecrated Barbie dolls. Clever, biting, and impossible to put down.In the author's note for Evil Genius, Claire Oshetsky writes that their novel "owes its existence" to John Cheever's short story "The Five Forty-Eight."
Published in The New Yorker in 1954, "The Five Forty-Eight" is a story about Blake, a businessman who has a coercive sexual encounter with a secretary named Ms. Dent and then fires her. Full of despair and rage, she follows him and forces him at gunpoint to kneel before her with his face in the dirt. As he prostrates and weeps, she says, "Now I can wash my hands of you, I can wash my hands of all this."
The text suggests Blake raped Ms. Dent without explicitly saying so. Cheever writes: "If he had had any qualms, they would have ...
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