"Wishbone is like a Rorschach blot around which someone has neatly colored in all the spaces. "At its center is a compelling psychological thriller, a tale of obsessions, abduction and sexual humiliation that makes us think even as it makes us cringe. "Swirling around the suspense story are a host of other themes, layered and carefully drawn out like a dancer's veils: marriage, parapsychology, psychoanalysis, literary analysis.... "The story steadily picks up its pace as the veils briefly lift like curtains fluttering and resettling on Mabel Fleish's mind. No wonder she is so absent-minded and daydreamy--she's written a book that continues to haunt her. "The original book was itself a tale of drugs, cults and sex, couched in scholarly metaphors of Canaanite myths in which our disturbed but learned character has some expertise. "But Mabel still frets over it--and for more than one good reason. The story was based on her first lover, a charismatic 16-year-old who practiced voodoo rituals and who she believes committed suicide over her. While she was absorbed in writing the book her baby son died accidentally; it was a child she hadn't wanted in the first place, and she cannot shed her guilt. "And though Mabel has won some academic praise for the story, she knows it is "dirty" and has come from some shameful place in her psyche. She wonders if by imagining it into printed words she has wished it into existence. The book and its fictionalized protagonist--both named Bone--refuse to stay written. She's convinced they're trying to come back to life. "Is this in Mabel's very fertile imagination? What about the phantom phone calls, the ransom-style threatening notes? "It seems that the men at the college where Mabel's husband teaches all lust after Mabel's flesh, and to make matters worse, Mabel--who is biting an apple as the book opens--partakes quite often of forbidden fruit. "When Mabel disappears after a faculty Halloween party, police refuse to believe she's not just having another munch.... "Puns and allusions are essential to the story. Author Marcia Golub, a New Yorker who teaches writing at the Writer's Voice, knows that this is how the mind works: leaping for one association and landing on another, often finding pleasure or revelation in the new combination.... "The book jacket terms it `black' comedy,' and a reader certainly could find echoes of John Irving's The World According to Garp. "Still, I think the author's intention was to explore some very weighty themes through a graspable scenario, and the scope of this novel is wide and intriguing. The seminal questions left swirling in the stirred-up air after all the veils have dropped are worth pondering: "What does an author `create' in creating fiction? Is it possible for fiction to be truly the product of imagination, or is all literature essentially `real' life? "Who, really, is the `author' of anything (a query, raised at several points in the book, that is at the core of modern deconstructionist theory)? "Why does the human mind imagine perversions if it does not wonder about experiencing them? Can people will things to happen? How much of our lives do we create by living things first in our imagination, or perhaps our subconscious? "If Wishbone succeeds as a thriller or a mystery, it fails in one important regard. Although it does not portray the sexual degradation in a salacious way nor does it ever endorse the idea that Mabel `was asking for it' even when Mabel wonders if she was, it fails to declare that an appetite for danger is never an invitation to torture or sadism." --Linda Crosson Dallas, Texas Morning News |
Wishbone"Erudite, spookily sexy, and ultimately very wise, Marcia Golub's Wishbone combines qualities of an erotic thriller with those of one of Umberto Eco's multidimensional philosophical mysteries. Funny and frightening by turns, Ms. Golub here proves herself again as a virtuoso punster, while at the same time showing a new talent for the genuinely hair-rising scenario. For its intellectual agility and its page-turning plot, Wishbone is delightful all the way through." It was apple weather and Mabel Fleish's nose was cold. She held a tissue to it as she slipped off her shoes. "Nubi," she called, holding the door. A large white dog bounded in. "You're a mess," she said, wiping his paws with a rag before letting him into the kitchen. He ran the length of the house while she hung her jacket on a hook, then returned to nuzzle his snout in her crotch. "Sit," she said, pushing him away. She put cider in the refrigerator, took out an apple. Washed it, kissed it, bit its cold skin. It was autumn again. Burning leaves, crispening air. Sweaters that seemed like old friends. The college town of Winegarden, New York, was filled once more with students, and even they seemed fresh in the red and gold light. It was the season of beginning--if only there was something to begin. Mabel hadn't begun work on a new novel yet. She didn't feel finished with the old one. Images, scenes, phrases kept occurring to her for a book that was already written. The publication she had once hoped for now seemed the granting of a fairy wish: There were hidden consequences. Before, she had taken chances because she had nothing to lose. Now she had everything. The mail was on the kitchen table. She flipped through bills and pleas till she came to a small envelope. It had no return address, just the letters BB in the corner. Her chest constricted with crazy hope. It had been twenty years. "Exactly twenty years," she realized with a start. Beau was dead but she opened the envelope, ready to believe in miracles. Words floated in an alphabet soup. The letters were cut out, not typed, but because the typeface and size used for each letter was identical they seemed to have been come from the same book. She read the message several times, trying to understand. "Mthr," it said, "dghtr, sistr, wfe: Ill git you bck if it tkes yr life. You had no rt to rt such lies. Ill cut the trth betwxt yr thighs--Bone." "It can't be," she said, the page trembling in her hand. She'd gotten correspondence from a ghost once before, so she knew the dead had their tricks. But Bone wasn't dead. He was never alive. How could she be haunted by a figment of her imagination? "You're a character in a novel," she said aloud, then knew she wasn't alone. Copyright © 1995 by Marcia Golub All rights reserved |
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