Seven Types of Ambiguity - Hardcover

Perlman, Elliot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 157322281X ISBN 13: 9781573222815

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2004

Synopsis

Frustrated by years of unrequited love, an unemployed schoolteacher takes matters into his own hands, with unexpected repercussions, in a novel about obsessive love, told in seven parts by six different narrators whose lives have become entangled with one another. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Elliot Perlman was born in Australia. He is the author of the short-story collection The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, which won the Betty Trask Award (UK) and the Fellowship of Australian Writers Book of the Year Award. Riverhead Books will publish this collection in 2005.

Reviews

Seven Types, a bestseller in Perlman’s native Australia, centers on the consequences of unrequited love. Simon’s psychiatrist’s monologue sets the stage for following narrators, who simultaneously move the story forward, confuse our understanding of events, and bare their souls. The ambitious novel is many things (too many?) at once: a psychodrama, social critique, love story, courtroom drama, and literary thriller. At heart, writes The New York Times Book Review, it invokes a Victorian novel’s exploration of the world through fiction. A disappointing final narrator, some implausible incidents, a self-indulgent tone, and myriad digressions bothered some critics. But in the end, Seven Types offers an illuminating story about the nature of truth.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

By copping the title of William Empson's classic of literary criticism, Australian writer Perlman (Three Dollars) sets a high bar for himself, but he justifies his theft with a relentlessly driven story, told from seven perspectives, about the effects of the brief abduction of six-year-old Sam Geraghty by Simon Heywood, his mother Anna's ex-boyfriend. Charismatic, unemployed Simon is still obsessed with Anna nine years after their breakup—to the dismay of his present lover, Angelique, a prostitute. Anna's stockbroker husband, Joe, is one of Angelique's regulars, which feeds Simon's flame. When Angelique turns Simon in to the cops, he claims he had permission to pick Sam up; his fate hinges on whether Anna will back up his lie. Most of the perspectives are linked to Simon's shrink, Alex Klima, who writes to Anna and counsels Simon, Angelique and Joe's co-worker, Dennis. The most successful voices belong to Joe, who's spent his career on the edge of panic, and Dennis, whose bitter rants provide a corrective to Klima's unctuous psychological omniscience. Perlman, a lawyer, aims for a literary legal novel—think Grisham by way of Franzen—and the ambition is admirable though the product somewhat uneven. Simon's obsessions, his self-righteousness and his psychological blackmail, give him a perhaps unintended creepiness, and the novel, as big and juicy as it is, may not offer sufficient closure.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Cheekily swiping the title of William Empson's seminal work of literary criticism, this second novel by Perlman, an Australian writer, presents seven first-person narrators—whose lives are all nudged off course by a man's abduction of his ex-girlfriend's young son—in a compulsively readable tangle. At the center is a psychiatrist who treats several of the characters, and whose narrative provides some basis for assessing the partial perspectives of the six others. The abductor's self-justifying rants about truth, literature, and poststructuralist theory win over his shrink and, it seems, everyone else. Still, if the individual stories of these characters are compelling, their attempts at Empsonian hermeneutics are less so.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Australian novelist and barrister Perlman borrowed the title of this lengthy but fast-moving, reflective yet suspenseful novel from a book by the poet/critic William Empson, and both ambiguity and poetry shape this harrowing tale. Simon is the catalyst, a well-read and oddly charismatic laid-off grade-school teacher whose depression cues readers to Perlman's low-key but palpable indictment of a money-mad, morally bankrupt society. His obsession with Anna, the lost love of his life (her long-concealed reason for leaving him involves one of the book's many disturbing sexual encounters), sets in motion a series of unintended and unforeseen crises involving everything from insider stock tips to SIDS to prison violence. Drawn into the matrix of suffering is Anna herself; her stockbroker husband, Joe; their young son; as well as Angela, the most unlikely of good-hearted prostitutes; Alex, a compassionate but not always professional psychiatrist; and Mitch, Joe's richest client. Perlman succeeds in illuminating the ambiguity inherent in lust, personal relationships, psychiatry, and the law by having each of his afflicted characters recount his or her version of the confounding betrayals, rapes, maladies, accidents, desperate measures, courtroom machinations, and deaths that transpire over the course of this smart and edgy novel. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 157322281X
• ISBN 13: 9781573222815
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 640