Blackeyes

Potter ( Pennies from Heaven ) offers a brilliantly executed tale about narrative control and sexual politics in which three voices struggle to seize the story of a victimized fashion model. An elderly writer, Maurice James Kingsley, stuns the British literary world with his novel ``Sugar Bush''stet quotes that details the tortured life of ``Blackeyes,'' a young model who is repeatedly abused by the men whose fantasies she projects upon billboards and television screens. The public lionizes Kingsley's work as a shocking representation of the plight of women. But the story is not his: Kingsley's niece Jessica had spoon-fed him her own biography in a calculated attempt to avenge a devastating past offense. In a frenzy, she now wants to ``dismantle his narrative, reclaiming herself'' and ``rescue the sad girl in the fiction and the angry woman in her real life.'' In a final twist, the reader too becomes persecutor, partaking in vicarious thrills and horrors through the filter and control of a mysterious third narrator. (October)