You’re not going to like Dr. Caroline Strange, the psychiatrist in Louisa Luna’s constantly surprising TELL ME WHO YOU ARE (MCD x FSG, 340 pp., $29), but you might admire her ingenuity and ruthless instinct for self-preservation. She needs both those qualities to deal with the chaos wrought by Nelson Schack, a new patient with two unwelcome pieces of news. “I think I’m going to kill someone,” he declares, “and I know who you really are.”
Further complicating matters are the plight of a missing woman named Ellen Garcia, who is slowly being starved to death by an unknown kidnapper, and the truth about Caroline’s unsavory past. The list of people who are hiding things, either subconsciously or on purpose, is extremely long.
“This is the first outright lie I tell them,” Caroline notes of her initial interrogation by the police, when she’s asked what she knows about Ellen.
It’s always interesting to grapple with the possibility that characters behaving in inexplicable ways might actually be suffering from dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Once she’s introduced this subplot, Luna does an excellent job of sending us down dead ends and switchbacks, as we try to figure out which characters are psychopathic criminals, and which are merely psychopaths (or not).
No matter how dodgy Caroline is — and we won’t know until the very end — she compels our interest in part because of how funny she is.
“Firm up the core and sprint, fat ass,” she says to herself as she runs, adding, “As a mental health professional I caution against negative self-directed talk, but sometimes, just between me and me, a little degradation goes a long way.”
Would I hire Caroline Strange as my therapist? No, I would not. But if I were accused of murder, I might study her techniques for dealing with the police.
An heiress turned Surrealist painter whose masterpiece disappeared with her in a fire in Paris in 1938. A British art history student eager to unearth the truth, a half-century later. A vanished servant; a mysterious bequest; a grand country estate blighted by tragedy and replete with Egyptian artifacts: A reader can get dizzied by the details in THE FINAL ACT OF JULIETTE WILLOUGHBY (Harper, 321 pp., $29.99), the third book by a British husband-wife duo writing as Ellery Lloyd. But its engaging central story invites you to push past the excess and revel in the mystery.
In 1991, Caroline Cooper, a Cambridge University undergraduate, becomes obsessed with a long-lost painting by a long-dead artist: Juliette Willoughby’s “Self-Portrait as Sphinx,” which was exhibited at André Breton’s famous 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition before being hastily removed by the artist. (The painting is fictional; the exhibit was not.) Though Juliette and her lover died not long afterward, Caroline believes the painting may have survived.
The novel jumps back and forth between eras and perspectives, from 1938 to the present and from Caroline and another student (and her future husband), Patrick Lambert, to Juliette herself. Some people who should be alive turn up dead; some people who should be dead turn up alive. At its heart is the intricate painting, with its winged Greek sphinx.
“A Greek sphinx is a sphinx with a riddle,” Caroline says. “That’s why she painted herself as one.”
As you begin reading Teddy Wayne’s THE WINNER (Harper, 305 pp., $30), about a handsome outsider who teaches tennis in a WASPy East Coast enclave, you might feel that you’ve met this sort of character before. (In fact, someone similar appeared in Emma Rosenblum’s “Bad Summer People” last year.)
But the familiarity, such as it is, won’t prepare you for the pleasurable chill of watching Wayne’s slow-motion psychological disaster unfold.
Desperate for money to repay his law school loans and to buy insulin for his diabetic mother, who has lost her job and her health insurance in the pandemic, Conor O’Toole takes a summer job in Cutters Neck, a bastion of old-money privilege so exclusive that the residents change the entrance gate code every two weeks.
Studying for the bar exam in his spare time, he picks up some cash from extracurricular lessons with Catherine Remsen, a hot, rich 51-year-old divorcée whose idea of foreplay is grinding against him while he’s giving hands-on instruction. (Who’s teaching whom when they finally make it to bed is another story.) All seems manageable until he meets a young woman on the beach and makes the mistake of thinking that no one will notice he’s sleeping not just with the divorcée, but also with her daughter.
Wayne has a pitch-perfect understanding of this tiny slice of American privilege, and also a sense of what might happen to a deeply admirable character whose strong moral code is severely tested by circumstance. I was reminded at various times of “The Great Gatsby,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and, in a different way, “The Graduate.” All those books filled me with unease. This one made me feel beside myself with anxiety.
