Dimensions
224 x 153 x 18mm
"Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.
Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could."
When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary-his early stealth has given way to conversational slip-ups and telltale soda-can rings on her desk-she calmly drives to her bank in uptown Minneapolis and rents a safe-deposit box. There, in a room no bigger than a closet, she will begin her "Blue Notebook," as much the truth about her life and her marriage as the "Red Diary," still tucked away where her husband can find it, becomes a carefully calculated farce.
Alternating between these two records, complemented by unflinching third-person narration, SHADOW TAG is a gripping account of a marriage in crisis. The struggle of one partner to reclaim her independence, while the other schemes to keep hold of what he thinks he possesses, fuels a tense and breathtaking psychological drama. When the novel opens, Irene has resumed work on her previously abandoned doctoral thesis about George Catlin, the nineteenth-century painter of Native Americans, whose subjects often accused him of stealing their souls. Gil, who gained notoriety as an artist through his emotionally revealing portraits of his wife-work that is adoring and sensual, but also humiliating, even shocking-realizes that the threat to his marriage, and his heart-pounding fear of losing Irene, may allow him to create the defining masterpieces of his career.
Meanwhile, Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children: 14-year-old genius Florian, who is beginning to escape his family's unraveling with joints and stolen bottles of wine; Riel, their only daughter, an 11-year-old precociously and intensely consumed by planning for natural disaster; and sweet kindergartner Stoney, who was born, his parents come to realize, at the beginning of the end.
As her home increasingly becomes a place of violence and secrets, and she drifts further into alcoholism, Irene makes moves to end her marriage. But her connection to Gil is not so easily severed. And no decision worth making comes without loss. In brilliantly controlled prose, SHADOW TAG fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and the anatomy of one family's pain.
