From Publishers Weekly
This work explores the ways life influences art and vice versa, but there is no life in these pages and more artifice than art. Each of the two related novels that comprise the work has a title page identifying the author as "Bess Arden." The first story is related by Arden's protagonist, Mara, an author whose specialty is "dark, slightly twisted, angry romances." One of those romances draws on Mara's own affair with a man named Aidan. Seven years after Aidan's death, his son James appears at Mara's home in Venice, hoping to learn about her and the father he hardly knew. James is obsessed with Mara's novel and with Mara; when a relationship develops between them, Mara decides to flee, going "just far enough out of the novel so that James would not know where to look for her." The second "Arden" novel is the tale by Mara that captivated James; it recounts, in Aidan's voice, his affair with Mara. Unfortunately, like Aidan's observation that "today would be yesterday's news tomorrow," this work as a whole demonstrates that though a statement is convoluted, it can still be banal. Ashley is the author, under a pseudonym, of Practice to Deceive.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Ashley's fiction debut is composed of two cleverly interconnecting, manneristically twisted novellas about three pieces of Venetian flotsam--a beautiful, lonely writer named Mira; her dying, Thomas Mann-ish lover, Aidan; and his confused son, James. In ``The Name of the Father,'' young James appears on Mira's doorstep, as if washed up by the tide, to meet his late father's last paramour and, through her, to come to know Aidan--who abandoned his son many years ago to his movie-star wife. James uses Mira's roman
clef about her relationship with Aidan (called ``The Name of the Son'') to guide him in his quest, dogging Mira as she roams about Venice, making love to her on his father's grave, and helping her dry out the pages of her latest manuscript after it falls into the canal. Eventually, though, they part, with some suggestion that once the two of them sort out their tangled emotions, they'll reconnoiter. Then Ashley launches into The Name of the Son itself, which describes how Aidan and Mira got together. And all the Venetian settings from the first novella are revisited, this time with another set of high-strung lovers--Mira and the elderly Aidan--though the end of the tale has already been writ in the stones of Venice, since Aidan dies, leaving Mira ready to receive his son seven years hence. The prose is as overwrought as the characters (``...she had fallen in love with him. And fallen. And fallen. Until he himself had been felled''), and one senses that beneath all the sound and fury, there isn't much. At best, then: a kind of aesthetic back- rub for those with a taste for high-design fiction. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
