Revenge (Hardcover)

Loretta Partlow is a world famous novelist who has built a career on drawing from real life experience, putting the people she meets into her books, often barely disguised. Now living in Hartford, Connecticut, Loretta has built a comfortable, and salubrious life for herself and for Patrick her less successful writer husband.

Loretta, however, can't face her own dark stories. Haunted by the failures of Sean, her wayward and truant son, Loretta feels free to feed on the stories of others. It is in Andrea Geller, a talented artist, who is currently tenured at Heartwood College, that the author sets her sights on, seeing a powerful new story, and a possible new bestseller.

Reeling from the death of her father, Andrea is convinced that he drove off the bridge that night, overly medicated and mentally out of control. She blames Elena, her stepmother, who has so manipulated the family that she even achieved in exorcising Andrea and her brother Robby, out of the family inheritance. Bitter and resentful, Andrea is more than willing to tell Loretta her life story, in part to expose Elena, but also to exorcise the ghosts of her past.

In Loretta, Andrea has found a willing listener. For both Andrea and Loretta, the act of listening and also their respective creative processes, the artist and the writer, are analogous to therapy - that is, it focuses on the self, and specifically on dealing with, and hopefully resolving, Andrea's intensely personal problems.

Loretta is a woman who is easily old enough to be Andrea's mother, who has become her friend, and along the way her confessor. And it is as though Andrea could not be absolved until she has told Loretta all. She feels that she and the novelist have been thrown together for a reason. Not just for Andrea's plan to get back at Elena, but also for something even more, something neither of them can know.

While Loretta registers shock at Andrea's story, calling it disturbing and saying, "it almost makes no sense," she's secretly plotting and maneuvering - the reader is never sure what she's planning. In actuality, Loretta is something akin to "a diesel engine, a gorgon, and a devourer of whatever gets in her way." Andrea - for her part - almost revels in being pitied; this is what Andrea had been counting on; she knows what Loretta thinks when she sees her.

Morris has crafted a seductively cautionary tale that carefully skewers middle class college life, whilst also highlighting the artistic pretensions of her two principle protagonists. The story is a skillful exploration of the dark undercurrents of deception, artistic longing, and betrayal, the plot deftly heightening the main characters journey into moral ambiguity, exposing their deepest insecurities and fears. Once Loretta's motivations become clear, Andrea is suitably shocked, but she also becomes even more desperate to save the friendship. She realizes that she must finally confront her nemesis.

Stevenson writes with candor and self-confidence, totally in tune to the restrained hypocrisies of this insular Hartford academic world. Loretta sees herself as a woman of accomplishment, who will stop at nothing to obtain a story, whilst Andrea casts herself as the victim, so blindsided by Loretta's fame and notoriety that she finds that her whole life has been transformed "into a still life."

The characters in Revenge are vulnerable, and exposed; but they are also calculating and manipulative, haunted by the practice of deceit and the ineffable urge to tell the truth, to uncover a web of lies and falsehood that seems to be forever entwined. One thing is for certain: Andrea needs to tell her story, over and over again, perhaps eventually freeing her up, so that she can finally move on, from the ghost of her father and from Loretta's machinations. Mike Leonard December 05.