A Version of Love: A Novel - Hardcover

Dillon, Millicent

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393052168 ISBN 13: 9780393052169

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

"By turns tantalizing, chilling, spellbinding...an icy dissection of how men and women can drive each other completely berserk."―Carolyn See

Not since D. M. Thomas's bestseller The White Hotel has there been such a remarkable novel about women, hysteria, and the profession of psychiatry as practiced by men. Set in California and Mexico in the late 1950s and early 1960s, A Version of Love is a bizarrely riveting tale of transgressive desire. Its lead players form a precarious triangle: a psychoanalyst who sleeps with his patient; a female "hysteric" on the verge of being cured; and a loner in the Sierra foothills who goes panning for gold and then love. "A dazzling achievement" (Robert Olen Butler), "a work of almost spookily controlled intelligence," A Version of Love is a breakthrough novel by Millicent Dillon, who "deserves to be honored as an American master of fiction" (Philip Lopate). "A brilliant new novel. The assurance and economy with which she gives us this strangely gripping and powerful story...are the hallmarks of a consummate artist....Her finest work yet."―Diane Johnson

About this title

About the Author

Five times the recipient of O. Henry Awards for short stories, Millicent Dillon was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2001. A novelist, biographer, and playwright, she lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist and biographer Dillon (Harry Gold; You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles) has written a probing, intense examination of a corrosive affair between a psychoanalyst and his needy patient. Set in "1959 or 1960," the novel opens with Edmond and Lorle on a road trip across California's gold-mining country. Their affair is illicit and furtive; she has been seeing him (as a patient) for three years, and he has diagnosed her as a hysteric. The romantic relationship, a chilly affair in which they find each other alternately loathsome and enticing, is a new development. Both Edmond and Lorle are haunted by their concurrent divorces. As they drive along (mostly in silence), the two reflect on the paths that have led them here. The self-contained, aloof Edmond reconsiders the consequences of their fling, and he decides to give Lorle her walking papers. Prepared for an outburst, he is stunned and deflated by her subdued response to his rejection. Lorle exults in her brief moment of power, as Edmond sinks further into dejection. The third character in this dance of desire is Vern, a gold-panning recluse whom Edmond and Lorle meet as they pass through the Sierra foothills; Vern later shows up at Lorle's doorstep unannounced and proposes a trip to Mexico. Dillon's cool, detached style perfectly captures the couple's clinical, Freudian view of relationships, as well as the laconic argot of the 1950s. ("This wasn't love and couldn't be. In the final analysis, it was nothing but transference, he knew that.... He had to admit his own complicity in this, his own failure. What a damn fool he had been.") Her novel is a crisp, intelligent snapshot of an era in which men and women struggle against each other in isolation.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0393052168
• ISBN 13: 9780393052169
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288