Infidelity Is Steeped In Suspense In 'Among The Ten Thousand Things'

Transcript

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. A just-published debut novel about an age-old topic has caught the attention of our book critic, Maureen Corrigan. Here's her review of "Among The Ten Thousand Things."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN, BYLINE: Talk about opening with a bang. At the beginning of Julia Pierpont's debut novel, "Among The Ten Thousand Things," an 11-year-old girl named Kay Shanley enters the lobby of her New York City apartment building. We readers have already been clued in to the fact that Kay is the kind of awkward, shy preteen other girls ridicule. We just want her to get safely into her family's apartment and back to watching the "Harry Potter" movies she loves. But just as the elevator doors are closing, the door man signals for her to hold up. He hands her a package addressed to her mom, who's called Deb. Because the flaps of the package are merely tucked in, not taped, because Kay spies something pink where the flaps don't meet and because that spot of pink makes her hope the package is a present for her that her mom has ordered, Kay opens it. Before you can say, Pandora's box, evil flies out in the form of pages and pages of printed emails - many of them graphically erotic - between Kay's father and a woman he has had an affair with. Kay doesn't even know the meaning of some of the words she sees, but she does get the meaning of the cover note, the obscenely pink thing that lured her in. It's a letter from the other woman to Kay's mother. And it reads in part, (reading) dear Deborah, I began sleeping with your husband last June. We were together for seven months.

If Pierpont simply took it from there and chronologically traced the fallout of this terrible knowledge on Kay, her older brother Simon and her parents, then "Among The Ten Thousand Things" would deserve a nod as a closely observed work of domestic fiction. But what sets Pierpont apart from the pack of other accomplished young graduates of elite creative writing programs - she went to NYU - is her storytelling chops. The chapters that follow that dramatic opening make it clear that there are going to be as many ingenious twists and turns in this literary novel as there are in a top-notch work of suspense, like "Gone Girl." The effect is dizzying. As a reader, you feel, as the Shanleys do, that the earth keeps shifting beneath your feet. Early on, here's how we're told that Jack Shanley, an artist and the dad now in the doghouse, somewhat smugly assumes the future will play out.

(Reading) His wife would fight with him, really just yell, because who can fight with a spineless thing? A misshapen, regretful thing that curls up and sleeps with white flags waving like wind shield wipers. She'd get sick of yelling, of crying. When she cried, Kay cried, Simon cried. They'd speak to him only when his physical presence was an impediment, when he was blocking the refrigerator and they needed him to move. And then they'd be over-polite.

Because Pierpont doesn't want her readers to get caught up solely in the suspense about whether or not Kay's parents will stay together or divorce, she does something nervy right in the middle of this novel. She inserts a glimpse into the future. Then, after our curiosity about the Shanleys is satisfied, we readers are asked to turn our full attention back to those first raw weeks after that box of printed emails arrives - smart. Pierpont's gift for offbeat construction and for telling descriptions extends to less weighty scenes as well. There are comic moments scattered around here, mostly via quick, rye observations. When, for instance, Deb, a former ballet dancer, heads off to meet a more successful dancer friend, we're told that the two women were going to lunch because each had been waiting for the other to cancel. Making dates only to call them off was how they kept in touch. "Among The Ten Thousand Things" may deal with that familiar staple of fiction, unhappy families, but it does so in such unexpected ways that it's a fresh pleasure to read. In fact, it's such a pleasure that you almost forget that everyone you care about in this novel is miserable.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University and is the author of "So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be And Why It Endures." She reviewed the novel "Among The Ten Thousand Things," by Julia Pierpont. If you'd like to catch up on recent interviews you missed with people like Jake Gyllenhaal, Ian McKellen and Amy Schumer with Judd Apatow, check out our podcast. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.