The Whiteness of Bones

In her ravishing and moving second novel, the bestselling author of In the Cut tells the story of Mamie Clarke, who sets out to lose herself in New York City.

Having only previously known the fragile, magical world of her childhood on the lush Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, Mamie leaves college to visit her sophisticated aunt in New York. With her beautiful and self-destructive younger sister Claire in tow, Mamie must learn to make her way in a world of money, power, sex, and drugs. Moore’s sharp and witty book captures an unforgettable time and place—the Manhattan of the early 80s— and the powerful feelings engendered there.

Publishers Weekly

Returning to the Hawaiian setting of her highly praised first novel, My Old Sweetheart , Moore here evokes also the fashionably decadent milieu of the idle rich in 1980s Manhattan. Mamie Clarke grows up on the island of Kauai, desperately seeking the attention of her remote, ``benignly distracted'' mother. When she is 12, Mamie is sexually fondled by a trusted servant, a traumatizing event for which she feels she is to blame, and which leads her to despise her body and her femininity. Socially inexperienced and naive, at 21 she goes to New York to live with her scatty Aunt Alysse, one of a group of free-spending, indolent, vacuous, boozy and much-married womenall of them out to snare yet another man. Mamie is able to resist Alysse's meretricious values, but her younger sister Claire, who has reacted to their upbringing by becoming as irresponsible as Mamie is preternaturally guilty and responsible, eagerly enters into Alysse's sophisticated circle, where she falls prey to the drug culture. While Moore's spare but lyrical prose is compellingespecially when she describes the rhythms of island lifeher psychological portrait of Mamie eventually takes on an overwrought and rather hysterical tinge. Nonetheless, this is an engrossing novel, profoundly disturbing in its message of feminine guilt, yet satisfying in Mamie's eventual recognition of how to ``purify'' her soul. (Mar.)

Susanna Moore is from Hawaii but now lives in New York City. She is the author of the novels In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, will be published by the National Geographic Society in 2003.