Girl Beside Him - Softcover

Mazza, Cris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573660922 ISBN 13: 9781573660921

Publisher: Fiction Collective 2, 2001

Synopsis

Cris Mazza's fiction has been called experimental, and stylistically it is, in the same way that Chekov's prose can be called experimental. Like the Russian author, Mazza uses an impressionistic technique to create characters so unusual, they become emblems for whole orders of social ills. Unfolding with the grim assurance of an autopsy, Girl Beside Him lays bare pathologies of self and society.

As the novel unfolds, a moody naturalist obsessed with target shooting meets his pretty assistant, rebounding from her bitter divorce, via a classified ad. Brian and Leya work together in the Wyoming outback, a landscape quick with beauty, death and sex. Ostensibly they have joined forces to track wild cougar, but humanity is the most endangered species here.

As the story lopes along, the naturalists, made feral by heartbreak and the drone of pop culture, spend the summer tracking cougars....

Taking Sartre's aphorism, hell is other people, to new, dreadful extremes, Mazza's varmits know that the only thing wrong with any landscape is who else is living in it. From deep inside her character's skins, Mazza brings a psychological awareness to her novel that would make Stephen King squirm.

In her ninth work of fiction, Cris Mazza walks the fence between man and nature, instinct and compusion, all the while throwing rocks into the yawning gulch between the sexes. As a portrait of our species, Girl Beside Him is a powerful book.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

A wildlife biologist named Brian, observing a group of relocated cougars, attempts to repress the desires that he fears may make him a sex killer. In his struggle to understand himself, he finds an answer, but not without putting another at risk. A cougar is set free of her collar and the bonds of human oppression; a woman is freed of her dangerous obsession, and a man is freed of his deepest dread-though freedom comes with a price.

Near Rawlins, a town of truck stops, bars, and one taxidermist, Brian and his assistant Leya track the cougars by helicopter. Working in isolation, a dangerous intimacy develops between them. Brian is forced to confront his role in the death of his sister, one he threatens to repeat, while Leya's perverse fascination with his guilt leaves her vulnerable. When the locals, suspicious of environmentalists, threaten Leya's life, Brian must decide whether to intervene or to satisfy his craving for sex through violence.

Girl Beside Him probes the limits of human relationships, testing their mental and sexual extremes. Mazza's complex characters define their own reality. Through letters, dreams, memories and innovative dialogue, she invents two separate unsettling perspectives and makes us believe in both. Transgressive and addictive, Mazza once again takes her readers beyond the mainstream, and into a region of dark sexuality, torn between love and destruction.

About the Author:

Cris Mazza is the author of seven other books of fiction, including Dog People, Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? and How To Leave a Country (winner of the PEN Nelson Algren Award).

About this edition

• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1573660922
• ISBN 13: 9781573660921
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 269