In the novella, a married woman reads Wuthering Heights at the same time that she falls under the erotic and destructive spell of her own Heathcliff. In the stories that follow, a single photograph illuminates the intricate web of connections between friends at an Italian café; a forgotten act of violence in New York’s Carl Schurz Park returns to haunt the present; and a woman is prompted by a flurry of mysterious emails to recall her time as a member of the infamous Rajneesh cult.
...restrained but remarkably arresting ... Using the same flat, fragmentary style that proved so fruitful in her most recent novel, Sisters, Tuck constructs her narrator’s story from a series of short, clipped sections, sometimes a couple of paragraphs, others no more than a line or two per page. It’s a master class in digression as a narrative device ... Heathcliff Redux is a much more visibly knotty intertextual exercise ... Fittingly, Tuck’s novella eventually reveals itself to be more a tale of self-delusion and internal conflict than the grand romance we were initially led to believe ... a haunting if slightly unbalanced collection. There’s something endlessly fascinating in the way Tuck’s interest in literary relationships extends even to the works in her own oeuvre.
That the world can be unkind, particularly to women, isn't lost on Lily Tuck ... Tuck often writes about women whose prospects are limited by their historical era and choice of mate ... the women of the stellar Heathcliff Redux: A Novella and Stories are vulnerable in ways that the men around them are not ... The women of Heathcliff Redux aren't without agency: like their male counterparts, they take drugs, have affairs. But Tuck's stories' power imbalances, especially men's surpassing physical strength, keep the writer ever watchful, her sentences stark with circumspection and glistening with clarity ... superb.
[Tuck] probes the gulf between expectations and reality as well as between outward appearances and internal disquiet in this collection of four short stories and a novella ... Tuck’s measured prose contrasts its matter-of-factness with the passionate overtones of Brontë’s original. The accompanying stories also showcase the author’s mastery of shorter form fiction ... Tuck’s restrained and elegant stories deceptively carry a deep emotional heft.
