Cast in Doubt

Description:

While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts. Then a young, enigmatic American woman joins this crowd of outsiders.

Brief description: Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany, and lives in New York with bass player David Hofstra.

Review Quotes:
"Clever, witty, passionately written.... Lynne Tillman writes with such elan, such spirited delight and comic intelligence that it is difficult to take anything but pleasure...." -- Douglas Glover, Washington Post Book World

"With Cast in Doubt, Lynne Tillman achieves several different kinds of miracles. She moves into the skin of a sixtyish male homosexual novelist so effortlessly that the reader immediately loses sight of the illusion and accepts the narrator as a real person. Alongside the narrator we move into the gossipy, enclosed world of English and American artists and madmen living in Crete, and at every step, as the play of consciousness suggests, alerts, and alters, are made aware of a terrible chaos that seems only just out of sight. But what impresses me most about Cast in Doubt is the great and powerful subtlety with which it peers out of itself -- Tillman's intelligence and sophistication have led her toward a quality I can only call grace. Like Stein, Ashbery, and James, this book could be read over and over, each time with deepening delight and appreciation." -- Peter Straub

"Tingly, crisp, and wry.... Delightfully clever and probing." -- Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Tillman's evocation of Horace and his life among ruins both geographic and aesthetic is a tour de force. Cast in Doubt recasts every genre it touches-the expatriate novel, the mystery, the novel of ideas-like a multiply haunted house of both form and identity." -- Voice Literary Supplement, Best Books of 1992

"If you can keep up with him, Horace will take you all kinds of places.... I was unwilling to close the cover and break the spell. I turned the book over and started over again." -- Boston Phoenix

"A private eye in the public sphere, [Tillman] refuses no assignment and distils the finest wit, intelligence and hard evidence from some of the world's most transient artifacts and allegories. This is a truly memorable book." -- Andrew Ross

"Tillman . . . casts doubt on the basis of human cognition and our subjective knowledge of other people [in] this literate, diverting story." -- Publishers Weekly

Praise for Lynne Tillman:

"One of America's most challenging and adventurous writers." -- Guardian

"Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine -- not because I 'admire' her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel..." -- Jonathan Safran Foer

"Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman." -- Edmund White

"Anything I've read by Tillman I've devoured." -- Anne K. Yoder, The Millions

"If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the 00s, but in the last 50 years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years." -- Blake Butler, HTML Giant