Volume 54, Number 12 · July 19, 2007
The Fate of a Demon
By Hilary Mantel
Fieldwork
by Mischa Berlinski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $24.00
Early in Mischa Berlinski's gripping and entertaining first novel there is a piece of postmodern skittishness which points to a truth that novelists shy away from: their trade embarrasses them. When you first start making things up, you expect that someone is going to tell you to stop. Perhaps you want them to, so that you can get back to behaving like an adult, and make a living in the real world. You have to invent a character, a main character too—readers expect it, though the notion of setting up this giant 'as if' device and lugging it around with you is inherently shaming. You know your main character barely emerges from layers of solipsism, and for the longest time it—it is an 'it' before becoming a he or a she—dangles from some part of yourself, an ugly little parasite, an unviable conjoined twin.
Review, 3152 words
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