Whisper - Hardcover

Doty

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 068419287X ISBN 13: 9780684192871

Publisher: Scribner, 1992

Synopsis

After his father collapses on the street, Ben Hastings becomes obsessed with the older woman who rescued him, and as he comes to know her better, he falls prey to a sinister attraction, which drains him of everything but his passion for her

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Doty's follow-up to What She Told Him (1984) and Fly Away Home (1982) is the strange but compelling tale of a woman who attracts her lovers through the stories she tells--alluring fiction in the urban-gothic tradition, as brilliantly controlled as it is entrancing. For years, Ben Hastings has enjoyed the good life in Manhattan as a top executive and heir to his father's investment firm, with a beautiful wife and house in suburban Long Island. His perfect routine is disrupted, however, the day his father collapses on an upper Manhattan street, suffers a stroke, and winds up in a coma in a hospital bed. While visiting his father, Ben notices the hovering presence of a mysterious white-haired woman and experiences a compelling urge to learn her identity. When he manages to surprise her at his father's bedside, she tells him her name is Dorothea, and then begins the first of a series of dreamy, gothic-style stories whose mystery and wonder draw Ben first to her Manhattan apartment and, eventually, to her bed. So entranced does Ben become by Dorothea's accounts of her peripatetic childhood in New York, Paris, and the English countryside, her decadent, aristocratic parents, and her frequent encounters with death in its many guises that the investment banker begins to neglect both his business and his former, arid life in the suburbs. Even the discovery that Dorothea was his father's longtime mistress--a fact Ben has suspected all along--fails to discourage him from selling the business after the patriarch's death, deserting his wife, and moving into Dorothea's womb-like home. Whether or not the tales she spins are true is beside the point--it's the potency of the storyteller's imagination that holds Ben captive, and the power of letting go is hers alone. Masterful writing that itself enthralls the reader and leaves one wanting more. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

Dorothea Ellison, the mysterious center of Doty's new novel, is one of the most evocative fictional characters this reviewer has ever encountered, and Doty draws her out slowly, carefully. Hers is a singular world, one she creates and controls, and anyone who enters it must become a part of it. Therefore, one is disappointed as the story unfolds. An elderly banker collapses on a New York street and is ostensibly discovered by Dorothea. Along with his son, Ben, we slowly learn of her involvement with the dying man. All other characters and the plot pale in the face of Dorothea's narration of her past and her movement through the novel. The work lacks integration and the story itself is not entrancing, but readers will follow Dorothea as she shifts among people and events that are mere props in the life she is perhaps inventing for Ben. What Dorothea sees in Ben, why his family disintegrates, how the stories Dorothea tells mesh with the plot are not sufficiently developed to make this a satisfying novel. Still, it is recommended for large fiction collections on the basis of the strong characterization of its central figure.
- Joseph Levandoski, Free Lib. of Philadelphia
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 068419287X
• ISBN 13: 9780684192871
• Binding: Board book
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288