מאת James Lasdun
"Slippery, provoking and very timely." —Wall Street Journal
When an old flame accuses him of sexual assault, expat English journalist Marco Rosedale is brought rapidly to the brink of ruin. Marco confides in a close friend, the unnamed narrator, who finds himself caught between the obligations of friendship and an increasingly urgent desire to uncover the truth—until the question of his own complicity becomes impossible to avoid.
"Slippery, provoking and very timely." —Wall Street Journal
When an old flame accuses him of sexual assault, expat English journalist Marco Rosedale is brought rapidly to the brink of ruin. Marco confides in a close friend, the unnamed narrator, who finds himself caught between the obligations of friendship and an increasingly urgent desire to uncover the truth—until the question of his own complicity becomes impossible to avoid.
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Starred review from January 15, 2019
When a man is accused of rape by a colleague he had a fling with 30 years earlier, a friend with ties to both parties tries to sort out what actually happened.Lasdun (The Fall Guy, 2017, etc.) explores the social and psychological aspects of an abuse accusation in an expertly orchestrated and engaging novel set during the run-up to the 2016 election, back when candidate Trump's treatment of women looked like it could cause him trouble. Marco Rosedale is a middle-aged British television journalist now living in Brooklyn with his grown daughter, her partner, and his own somewhat younger Lebanese-Australian girlfriend. He has everything to lose when he hears from a British newspaper that a woman named Julia Gault is about to go public with an accusation against him in her memoir, based on a long-ago boozy fling which he recalls as consensual. His old friend, the unnamed narrator, is his main confidant as he moves from panic and confusion to maneuvering and mobilization. The narrator also knows Julia Gault; she was a protegée of his mother's and he had a teenage crush on her back in the day; in fact, he had at one point ambitiously planned to write a fictional portrait of her "in the monumental manner of Proust's Odette." Lasdun hooks the reader on his narrative with brief, tautly controlled chapters, each one adding new evidence and detail and relying on acute observation of the sometimes-bizarre machinations of the psyche. "I genuinely didn't know what I thought," explains the narrator as his opinion "lurch[es] between an icy willingness to condemn every accused man without further questioning, and what appeared to be a perverse, atavistic loyalty to the patriarchy that would take hold of me like a temporary seizure, and from which I would emerge stunned at myself."Of the novels to come out of the #MeToo moment to date, none is more riveting, insightful, and unsettling. Lasdun is the perfect writer to navigate these troubled waters from the male perspective.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
- Johanna Thomas-Corr;Observer An instant masterpiece that brings the taut psychological precision of a Chekhov story to a hyper-modern, post-#MeToo setting.
- Roger Cohen;New York Times [A] brilliant new novel of the #MeToo era.
- Katy Waldman;The New Yorker Lasdun's writing spreads implication like condensed flavor crystals that dissolve in water. By the end of the novel, he has examined every corner of the narrator's conflicted psyche... without once resorting to cliché.
- William Skidelsky;Financial Times Afternoon of a Faun has a propulsive energy.... The denouement, when it arrives, is shocking.
- Josephine Livingstone;New Republic Afternoon of a Faun is a highly conscientious novel, elegant in its execution and almost humble in its refusal to grandstand, or to turn a story about rape allegations into some didactic allegory.
- Patrick McGrath;New York Times Book Review Timely.... A well-drawn portrait of two flawed but highly articulate Englishmen in New York.
- Marcel Theroux;Guardian Each time we feel that we can definitively decide where to put our sympathies, the story jostles and unbalances us with new insights.
- Leyla Sanai;Spectator James Lasdun is my favourite 'should be famous' writer, his work extraordinarily taut and compelling.... Lasdun expertly demonstrates how inner moral structure is often built on the scaffolding of tenuous and arbitrary rules and self-justification. The complexity of male friendship is also wryly assessed.... Enthralling.
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Expertly orchestrated and engaging.... Of the novels to come out of the #MeToo moment to date, none is more riveting, insightful, and unsettling.
- Publishers Weekly [A] thought-provoking psychological thriller.... This novel comes to a brilliantly ironic conclusion that will leave readers reeling.
