cover image Jilted

Jilted

Jill Hoffman. Simon & Schuster, $19.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-79518-4

While reading this oblique and erotic first novel, it helps to remember that Hoffman's previous title, Mink Coat , was a volume of poetry. Viewed as poetry, the fluid passages here offer primal, uncompromising views of lust juxtaposed against images of fatal disease. However, readers expecting a solid plot and chronological progression will find themselves uncomfortably adrift in a first-person psychodrama. Poet Joy Frankel lives in New York of the '70s with her sexually submissive husband and three small children. Preferring macho partners, Joy blithely takes up with world-renowned painter Carl Vaggio. Despite the pain of his insults and his infidelities--among them Joy's best friend and, later, a married woman--Joy hopes that he will marry her. She leaves her husband and family, one of many jiltings or abandonments here that occur through free will and sometimes through death. Just as Joy's hunger for Carl becomes desperate, the narrative leaps forward a decade to a denouement so graceful that it nearly negates the narrative shortcomings. Yet Hoffman's artfully disjointed, intimate prose cannot compensate for a tendency merely to suggest the crucial details--Joy's ex-husband and children, for example--that are otherwise pointedly ignored. By failing to establish such concepts, this tale of obsession casts doubt on the existence of all but the narrator. (Oct.)