Truth About Marie, The [Paperback]

Harvard physics professor Bernadette O'Brien lies in a Georgia prison cell, awaiting execution for the murder of two students, killings that were performed as the culmination of intricate sexual ensnarements. As she prepares to die, Bernadette writes her life story in a notebook. That is the plot of Defiance... but this is not a novel that can be reduced to its plot; Carole Maso, in fact, repeatedly undermines efforts to glide through a straightforward narrative, plunging readers into the mind of her narrator. The novel's power comes not from its events, although those are certainly jarring enough, but from the ways in which those events are filtered through Bernadette's perspective--the juxtapositions of childhood traumas, mathematical puzzles, and cynical death row reflections (more than a few of which are inspired by the well-meaning social worker assigned to her case: "Not another stereotype at this late date. Please no."). Playing with various forms--symbolic logic, self-help literature, and sexual fantasy, among others--Maso takes a lurid tale and transforms it into a stunning glimpse into the mind of a woman who became a killer without, for all her sarcastic and unrepentant bravado, ever quite ceasing to be a victim. --Ron Hogan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A vivid rendering of the psyche of an unregenerate murderess breathes life into this impressive if typically irritating sixth novel from the prolific author of such postmodernist misfires as AVA (1993, not reviewed) and Ghost Dance (1996). Narrator Bernadette O'Brien, incarcerated in the Georgia prison where shell be executed, describes in an ``elaborate confessional'' (which she also calls her ``death book'') her troubled upbringing (in Irish-Catholic working-class Fall River, Mass.), precocious brilliance (which led her to Harvard at age 12 and early eminence there as a professor of physics), andin hair-raisingly explicit and vainglorious detailher seduction and then murder of two of her prize students. Maso tells Bernadette's lurid story in a calculatedly disjointed narrative that leaps forward and back in time and is composed of fragmentary remembered experiences and conversations, classroom lectures, diagrams (which mischievously parody scientific and mathematical formulae), poems, aphorisms, and amusingly grandiose quotationsand misquotations (mostly from Shakespeare). What emerges is a superb portrait of an unwanted daughter born to a 40-year-old mother and alcoholic father, and of a grieving sister (whose brother Fergus went to Vietnam and found ``an untimely, violent demise in an absurd cause'')a sister who would steel herself to become a powerful woman impervious to indignity and loss. That's all to the good; what isn't is the tiresome reiteration (familiar in Maso's fiction) of diatribes against American materialism, complacency, and intolerance; ``the peculiar behavioral habits of the heterosexual''; and, more generally (and more stridently), the ways in which men exercise power over women. The final pages, though, where Bernadette's rages are subsumed in her intimations of solidarity with other women prisoners and of reunion with her brother, are the most affecting Maso has written. Masos still a writer burdened by an agenda, but here shes grounded her protagonist's fulminations in a recognizable reality and in a manner that makes this at once her most convincingly textured and technically accomplished novel. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.