Narcissus Ascending
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Becky, Hugh, Dahlia, and Max. Friends who have formed a dysfunctional but necessary surrogate family. Callie, the crisis-prone, vivid, manipulative chameleon whose friendship has damaged them all individually but who still haunts their waking and sleeping dreams.
Becky, orphan, survivor, caffeine addict, on the verge of 30 and hoping to become famous with her first solo show of dismemberment collages in New York's East Village. Hugh, now a CPA in California, once the most sophisticated undergrad and object of Becky's frustrated desire and rivalry with Callie. Max, all leather, brooding and disguise, the actor who Callie left Hugh for, and who also had an affair with big-hearted, victimized dancer, Dahlia.
For as long as they have known each other their common language has been Callie—past tense. When Dahlia plots a revenge drama to be staged at Becky's gallery opening, she unwittingly revives their nostalgia for the outcast Callie's seductive charm and sets in motion a plan that forces Becky and Callie to play out their lethal emotional rivalry to the end. Told from the point of view of Becky, Narcissus Ascending is an unputdownable debut. Karen McKinnon's dissection of friendship, and the manipulative rivalry of two strong women is provocative and disturbing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McKinnon's debut offers a tightly focused group portrait of 20-something friends in Manhattan's East Village. Becky is an artist who turns photos of herself into collages; she's in love with Hugh, an accountant, and her best friend is Dahlia, a dancer. Erstwhile actor Max lurks around the edges of this makeshift family. Becky narrates, but it's Callie beautiful, treacherous, inscrutable and absent who is the novel's truest subject. The fast-paced story follows Dahlia's plan to finally break away from the femme fatale who has wounded them all, by inviting her to the opening of Becky's first show, where Callie will see them all happy and triumphant. Francine Prose gave McKinnon a New Voice Fiction Award for this work as a novel-in-progress, and the book's first half makes it easy to see why. The writing is exquisitely economical, each word a precise fit with the next: "His lips are slightly parted, the color of my chair. The pink velvet needs recovering. I like coffee and I'm careless." McKinnon also reproduces the overlapping rhythms of speech among old friends authentically, and Becky has a pleasingly dry sense of humor. But as the novel spirals into a revenge scenario, the story devolves into junior high histrionics, including an extravagant faked suicide attempt and elaborately unhealthy sex. By novel's end, the promise of its beginning the precision, the wit, the emotional clarity is overwhelmed by adolescent melodrama. Author tour.
