cover image Schrodinger's Baby

Schrodinger's Baby

H. R. McGregor. William Morrow & Company, $22 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-688-16893-3

Juliet Porteus, the narrator of this astonishingly adroit first novel, prefers technology to metaphor, and science to literature, which makes her the black sheep in her artistically inclined London family. She goes to Glasgow to study veterinary science, and falls under the spell of her bohemian roommates: Petruchio, a seemingly asexual Italian pharmaceutical researcher who pads around the apartment spouting his nihilistic views, and drama students Billy and Chris. It's Billy's friend Kerry, however, an elfin actress with a prevaricating soul, with whom Juliet drifts into an intense love affair. Juliet has a lot on her hands, since Kerry is an irrepressibly promiscuous and alarmingly self-destructive young woman. When Kerry returns from visiting theatrical agents in London and tells Juliet she is pregnant, Juliet is at her wit's end with jealousy and worry. There's more crisis on the horizon, when Juliet finds the corpse of a woman dressed in a vampire costume at the foot of the apartment stairs. Shaken, she goes out to get cigarettes and to figure out what to do; when she gets back, the corpse has vanished. Was it a hallucination? If so, why are Kerry and Petruchio acting so suspiciously? The boho coterie splits up, with Petruchio going back to Italy, where he self-destructs, as Juliet discovers by accident. Juliet decides she must find Kerry to discover what really happened. McGregor's story never stops surprising with playful, gruesome twists; the consummately strange and complicated characters consistently illuminate this existential mystery with their electrifying shadow sides. This small masterpiece, like John Banville's The Book of Evidence, offers in its central mystery not simply a puzzle to solve, but an existential test of scruple that transforms McGregor's supple characters. Agent, Gelfman-Schneider Literary Agency. (Sept.)