cover image GONE

GONE

Martin Roper, . . Holt, $23 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-6775-0

With an unflinching and at times painful honesty, Roper's debut novel incisively explores the brutality of intimate relationships. Stephen, an angry young Dublin factory worker and aspiring writer struggles with the loss of his 19-year-old sister to cancer and the disintegration of his marriage to a controlling, bitter journalist, Ursula. He and Ursula marry early, "in love with notions of each other," but their marriage begins to collapse as they renovate a house she buys. Relentlessly tormented by a sadistic gang of neighborhood kids, they are unable to offer each other solace, and when Stephen gets the chance to move to New York, he takes it. In the city, where "life moves too quickly... to let memories gather," he begins a titillating and sometimes violent affair with Holfy, an independent photographer 15 years his senior, while still corresponding with Ursula. His tortured analysis of his interaction with these two very different women drives the novel. Though it lacks a conventional plot and is sometimes frustratingly vague on practical details—Stephen seems to earn a living only sporadically, and his aims as a writer are unclear—the book achieves an impressive consistency of tone and purpose. Roper has a keen and unforgiving eye for the little cruelties of love, and his perspicacious psychological explorations offer startling insight into the nature of artistic creation, death, pain, pleasure, desire and hatred. Agent, Beth Vesel. (Feb.)

Forecast:Excerpted in the New Yorker and highly praised by Jim Harrison and Margot Livesey, this astringent novel, akin to Hanif Kureishi's darker work, should appeal to readers interested in an unsentimental examination of relations between men and women.