Cut Away - Softcover

Kirkwood, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0980040795 ISBN 13: 9780980040791

Publisher: Arktoi Books, 2010

Synopsis

Cut Away is a novel that expertly entwines the lives of three characters struggling to understand the meaning of identity and its seeming mutability. Orbiting around the mystery of a missing teenager, a trio of narrators each tells her story in turn. Alexandra is a transgendered woman who has refused surgery and abandoned Los Angeles for a trailer at the desolate Salton Sea. Asa, the mother of the runaway, wants her grief-ridden face completely transformed. Eleanor, a plastic surgeon, is fascinated with surfaces and wonders whether visual harmony has the power to change what lies beneath. In a culture obsessed with transforming the body, do the incarnate fictions we create have the power to hide or reveal the truth of who we really are? This is a question that Catherine Kirkwood approaches in a stunning debut novel of desire, self-loathing, and the revisionary madness of our modern world.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Kirkwood's slender, desolate-feeling first novel, set between the California desert and L.A., hinges on an intricate emotional triangle revolving around a teenage runaway. Alexandra, a middle-aged transvestite living a celibate life on the Salton Sea, befriends the runaway, Olivia, at the girl's desert campsite before Olivia disappears. Eleanor, an L.A. plastic surgeon and a lonely lesbian, saw Olivia once in her office and later unknowingly gives a consult to Olivia's unstable mother, Asa, who has for several years cleaned Eleanor's office at night and begins to track the surgeon's whereabouts once she discovers the doctor's connection to Olivia. Meanwhile, Alexandra, enjoying a flirtation with the surgeon that begins after a body that might be Olivia's is found, stays at Eleanor's canyon home for a month, visited occasionally by Asa, disguised as a door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman. Once Kirkwood maps out the particulars, every maneuver on the part of these characters is fraught with tension. Kirkwood's exploration of personal and spiritual metamorphosis is all the more powerful for its surprising subtleties. (Apr.)
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Review

Like a surgeon’s knife, Kirkwood’s writing is precise, direct and unsentimental. Indeed, the novel cuts deeply.

—Helena Maria Viramontes, author of Their Dogs Came With Them
 

The vivid reality of the people and places keep us in their disturbing and beautiful world.

—Rachel Pollack, author of The Tarot of Perfection A Book Of Tales

A story whose characters are intriguing, complicated, and all searching for something or someone. You can’t help caring for them in the best possible way—without judgment; and you can’t help reading on late into the night to unravel the intriguing connections between them.

—Judith Barrington

Erotic, dark and intense . . . An original, thrilling debut.

—Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh

About this edition

• Publisher: Arktoi Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0980040795
• ISBN 13: 9780980040791
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 152