In a Deep Blue Hour

Stamm (The Archive of Feelings) explores the entanglement between a documentarian and her cagey subject in this sly metafictional novel. The sardonic narrator, a self-described “pragmatic hedonist” named Andrea, struggles to make a documentary about Richard Wechsler, an elderly and enigmatic Swiss novelist living in Paris. She develops an intimate and at times adversarial relationship with her subject, who mistrusts such projects and eventually sabotages the film by refusing to participate. The failure effectively ends Andrea’s career, rendering her “a filmmaker who doesn’t make films.” During the course of her research, however, she tracked down and befriended Wechsler’s longtime lover and muse, Judith, a version of whom appears in all his books. After the two women spend several days going through Wechsler’s possessions following his death from an illness, Andrea begins to spin her own fictions, imagining scenes from his life and the affair she never had with him: “I am Richard’s inheritance, a character he didn’t finish writing, left to wander in the limbo of unrealized novel figures.” Stamm’s earnest questions about the interplay between life and art and the value of biography are leavened by his caustic wit. Readers will be transfixed. Agent: Marc Koralnik, Liepman Agency. (Mar.)