From Publishers Weekly
When a reclusive, 38-year-old writer hires a near-illiterate young woman as an assistant at his suburban home in Carmel Heights, near Rochester, N.Y., he's unaware that a vehement anti-Semitism seethes beneath her tattoo-branded exterior. Renowned for The Shadows-his great early success, a novel based on his grandparents' experiences in Germany during the Holocaust-Joshua Seigl confuses his friends and sparks the anger of his hypomanic sister, Jet, when despite their objections he refuses to fire the young woman. A full portrait of the amiable, disillusioned Seigl emerges as he translates Virgil's The Aeneid, makes excuses for his failing health (he has recently been diagnosed with a debilitating nerve disease) and interacts erratically with his concerned friend, Sondra. Meanwhile, the mentally hollowed-out Tattooed Girl comes to seem a more realistic victim of persecution than any character in Seigl's historical fiction. Her soft, fleshy skin is defaced with ugly tattoos burned beneath her eye and on the backs of her hands by a mysterious group of abusive males. With scarcely a shred of self-esteem, she mumbles "Alma" to those who ask her name, "as if she had no surname. Or her surname wasn't important, as Alma herself wasn't important." She continually tries to impress her abusive, Jew-hating boyfriend, Dmitri, with little treasures stolen from her employer. Yet as she learns more about Seigl and his heritage, she can no longer ignore the dignity and respect with which he treats her. With her usual cadenced grace, Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; etc.) tells a mesmerizing, disturbing tale-though the little that is revealed of the Tattooed Girl's past may leave fans wanting more. Like the readers of Seigl's The Shadows, those who look for more meaning beneath the surface will be "forced to imagine what the writer doesn't reveal."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The wildly prolific Oates takes readers on another long, strange trip to the dark side in typically riveting fashion. Celebrated intellectual Joshua Seigl has been diagnosed with a debilitating nerve disorder at the age of 39. Having virtually fled from normal life into the orderly world of books, he is now faced with hiring an assistant to help him put his papers in order and negotiate stairs and doctors' appointments. He rejects, out of hand, any number of bright, fawning graduate students, settling instead on Alma, a virtually homeless street person. Seriously disturbed by her abusive upbringing, Alma has led a rebellious life of aimless promiscuity and drug taking and was victimized in high school by her so-called friends, who crudely tattooed her face and hands with ink. In some strange form of symbiosis, she proves herself to be an invaluable assistant. In one of the book's stunning ironies, Joshua, who wrote an acclaimed novel while still in his twenties, based largely on distorting the nature of his grandparents' experiences during the Holocaust, is ignorant of the fact that Alma is a virulent anti-Semite. His persistent kindness wins her over, but his naivete eventually costs Alma her life. Oates, who here creates the atmosphere of a fever dream, gives full rein to her fascination with the perverse side of human nature, and her readers will be mesmerized. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
