Don't Be a Stranger

August 15, 2024
A middle-aged New York writer loses herself to romantic obsession with a handsome musician. Loving someone who doesn't love you is bad. Everyone in Ivy Cooper's life keeps telling her that, and at 52, divorced from the father of her young son, now fixated on a younger man named Ansel Fleming who explicitly rejects any possibility of commitment from day one, she doesn't really need to be told. And it doesn't matter anyway because she's a goner, as fatally obsessed as any bunny-boiling love addict in life or literature. Minot is an elegant writer, her sentences and paragraphs stylishly cropped, her dialogue quotation mark-free, her epigraphs chosen from classic sources: Rilke, Emerson, Lao Tzu, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Rumi. In pellucid prose she captures each of the emotional states Ivy cycles through on the roller coaster of erotic fascination, delusion, bliss, mania, devastation--while also buffeted by the emotions and responsibilities of motherhood and of a career as a writer. While its individual parts are spare and polished, as a whole the book is ungainly. It's divided into three sections, each of which has three chapters. The last section, which occurs after we have the sense that we already know everything we need to know, begins with an overly arty chapter about seeking help in "the rooms"--the Brown Room, Pink Room, Red Room, White Room, etc.--revealed to be a therapist's office, yoga studio, 12-step meeting room, movie theater, lecture hall. In the next chapter, Ivy's son has a brush with a very serious illness, an inherently suspenseful topic, but which at this point raises the question, "What are we doing here?" When the final chapter begins with, "She felt she ought to be at the end of this by now. She looked back and saw that what she had thought was close to the end was more like only halfway through the middle," it's almost as if author and reader are sharing a private joke. Almost as painful to read about as it is to experience, which is both a complaint and a compliment.

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Starred review from September 1, 2024
Since her divorce and the onset of life as a single mother in a small New York apartment, writer Ivy has to force herself to engage with the larger world. A friend introduces her to Ansel, a songwriter and musician who has just exited a different sort of sequestration: seven years in prison on drug charges. She is 52; he is 34. The erotic magnetism between them is undeniable, and Ivy is enthralled and recharged by their rapturous sex. One blissful morning she teases, "Don't be a stranger." As he turns to leave, he says, "I am ephemeral as the wind." The battle is set. Ivy struggles to tamp down expectations; Ansel is intent on restarting his career. As she attempts to reconcile her passion and his elusiveness, divide mind from body, and come to terms with her past, we see the city through her omnivorous eyes in scenes redolent with longing and betrayal, helplessness and determination. While Ivy is in tumult, her sweet, funny young son urgently needs her attention. A virtuoso of psychologically intricate fiction, Minot (Why I Don't Write and Other Stories, 2020) exquisitely explores desire and denial, intimacy and illusion in a ravishing, haunting, and insightful tale of sexual ecstasy and emotional torment, integrity and creativity, self and motherhood.

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September 2, 2024
Minot’s lilting if myopic latest (after the collection Why I Don’t Write) revolves around a Manhattanite mother obsessed with a handsome younger man. Ivy, a divorced writer in her early 50s, is raising her third-grader son, Nicky, mostly on her own. After she meets and falls for Ansel Fleming, an enigmatic ex-con musician two decades her junior, the novel jumps from one of their trysts to the next, chronicling Ivy’s mounting preoccupation with her new lover. Their encounters are sporadic, so Ivy waits and broods, while caring for the ever-perceptive Nicky, who’s desperately trying to navigate his parents’ separation. But Nicky’s father is in Virginia, and Ivy is exhausted and vulnerable from managing life by herself. The reader gets only Ivy’s side of the affair, and it isn’t long before taciturn, self-absorbed Ansel begins to look like a bona fide jerk, and Ivy like a fool. As in Minot’s previous novels, sex is portrayed as a means of transcendence. The prose is often poetic, but the purportedly transportive nature of Ivy’s lovemaking with Ansel tends to strain credulity. For a tale of unrequited obsession, the tone is appropriately melancholic, if a bit too one-note. There are glimmers of Minot’s great early work, but this doesn’t scale the same heights. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA.

December 20, 2024

O. Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize winner Minot returns to novels after 2014's Thirty Girls. The story follows Ivy Cooper, 52 years old and launching a love affair with Ansel Fleming, a thirtysomething musician recently released from prison. One part of Ivy's mind is on her long list of responsibilities, while the other is consumed by her desire for Ansel. Prepub Alert.

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