Undone

New Yorker staffer Colapinto’s novel (after About the Author) is an over-the-top, irreverent, and darkly comical thriller. Dez, an ephebophile and convicted sex offender, has been fired from a high-school teaching job for being romantically involved with a 17-year-old student named Chloe. Unemployed, dejected, and hiding from the authorities in a northern Vermont trailer park, he passes time watching an Oprah-esque TV show called Tovah in the Afternoon. While watching the program one day, Dez learns from Chloe that her recently deceased mother had a brief summer flame with mystery-writer-cum-bestselling-memoirist Jasper Ulrickson roughly nine months before she was born. With this information in mind, Dez conjures a ruinous scheme to land the orphan Chloe under the wealthy Ulrickson’s custody, so she can seduce him into incestuous relations, file charges to claim monetary compensation, and in turn destroy his reputation. The wily Dez is able to pull the necessary strings to set the plan in motion, but an unlikely and absurd series of twists follows, leaving no character unscathed. Aggressively offensive and deliberately silly in its treatment of stock characters, scenarios, and tropes, Colapinto’s novel oscillates between highly ironic and deeply earnest treatments of this taboo subject matter. The story tackles sexual and moral dilemmas that are worth contemplating, delivering them at a breakneck and often entertaining pace. [em](Apr.) [/em]