Duchess of Nothing

Ligaya Mishan

Heather McGowan's new novel is unrepentantly difficult. In fact, it has all the elements required by the most demanding graduate student: an unreliable narrator, slippery wordplay, obsessive references to "Moby-Dick." But it also has a sneaky, irresistible charm.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

McGowan's maverick follow-up to her debut, Schooling (2001), stars a 30-ish divorced American woman who, it is implied, has the lithe frame, iconic features and sophisticated trashiness of Holly Golightly. Too smart for her own good and lacking Holly's ambition or drive, the nameless narrator is living in Rome with young, faceless lover Edmund-and caring for Edmund's seven-year-old half-brother. Edmund is described mostly in terms of the beauty of his back, about which the narrator is careful to instruct "Edmund's brother" (aka "the boy") lest he get duped into loving an unworthy object (as she has). The boy's "education" (she forbids him to go to school) is in fact her preoccupation, allowing McGowan to give the woman's autodidactic rants (on love) free rein. When Edmund abruptly leaves the odd menage, the woman and the boy run out of money, get increasingly desperate and contemplate ways of finding Edmund that won't make them lose face. The woman's absolute devotion to tiny matters of style and comportment, and her resolute obliviousness to the ridiculously mannered, bafflingly anachronistic figure she cuts, is a lode McGowan mines with relish as she slowly chips away at the woman's love for the boy. Weeks after finishing this singular, pointedly frustrating novel, readers will find that nameless woman's mind still moving restlessly within them. (Mar. 28) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An eccentric woman grudgingly undertakes the "education" of a small boy left in her charge, in this flinty second novel from the Brooklyn author of the well-received debut fiction Schooling (2001). The unnamed narrator has abandoned her (much older) German husband and taken up with Edmund, an amateur painter of some talent, who brings her to Rome, introduces her to his seven-year-old brother (also unnamed), then-for reasons that gradually, creepily emerge-abandons them both. She's a bilious combination of Patrick Dennis's Auntie Mame and Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie: a "hard" woman (more than one man has perceived) who has firmly distanced herself from her boringly conventional family, the aforementioned husband, her overweight housecat and virtually every Roman citizen who falls below her truculent high standards. "The boy," who survives by weathering her crazed mood swings, learns (as we do) that beneath her maliciously witty banter ("I don't enjoy maligning others. . . . On the other hand, it is vital to exercise our critical gifts") lurks a delusional manic-depressive paranoid hypochondriac of Olympian proportions. Edmund returns, takes them to his mother's rural home and tries to reshape them into something resembling a family. Simultaneously, McGowan peels away successive layers of defense mechanisms erected between the narrator and her personal history, a chronicle of youthful promise blighted by impulsive vanity, progressing through self-delusion to borderline-suicidal grandiosity ("When the time comes I will burn away, leave everyone coughing in my exhaust") and a claustrophobic overload of hard-earned guilt. The tricky narrative thus swings continually between bitchy reparteeand searching probes into the hollow core of a destroyed soul-all the more troubling because we watch its blithe corrupting influence on an innocent, though (thankfully) resilient child. A truly original premise, artfully developed into a memorable and perversely entertaining comic horror story.

Rick Moody

"Heather McGowan is the most elegant, arresting and lucid prose stylist I have encountered in years."