9780060531072

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A celebrated but reclusive author, generally regarded as a somewhat idiosyncratic bachelor, young but in failing health, Joshua Seigl reluctantly admits to himself that he can no longer live alone. Although it goes against his instincts to do so, he must hire an assistant to help him with his increasingly complicated professional and personal affairs. Considering at first only male applicants, he is dissatisfied with everyone he meets.

Then one day at the bookstore he encounters Alma. A young woman with synthetic-looking blond hair and pale, tattooed skin, she stirs something inside Seigl -- pity? desire? responsibility? Though he's uncertain why, he decides she is the one -- she will be his assistant. Unaware of her torturous past -- the abuses she's suffered, the wrongs she's committed, and the hatred that seethes within her -- he has no idea that he is bringing into his home an enemy: an anti-Semite who despises him virulently and unquestioningly. Seigl allows Alma more and more deeply into his life, mindless of the danger she presents. Yet their closeness forces Seigl and Alma to make discoveries that cut to the core of their identities.

With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates probes the tragedy of ethnic hatred and challenges accepted limits of desire.

"Oates is onto something with the bruised, malleable figure of Alma..., and Joshua Seigl's own fluctuations between scholarly integrity and a consuming temperamental weakness make him one of Oates's most interesting recent characters. But THE TATTOOED GIRL is flawed by the insistent presences of Jet and Dmitri....Better-than-average Oates, all the same."

Kirkus, 04/01/2003

"[I]n the world of THE TATTOOED GIRL, violence is ubiquitous; it rules. Hideous events occur with less psychological justification than they'd require in a Hollywood blockbuster...and the novel's bloodbath of a climax is frankly willful. It's difficult to tell, with a writer as talented as Oates, whether this willfulness is intentional. Perhaps the pointlessness--of violence, of prejudice--is after all precisely her point."

Sophie Harrison, New York Times Book Review, 07/13/2003

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