MixedLambda Literary...it was only a matter of time before flowers, and poison, and desire featured together in a novel about queer longing ...It’s a setup reminiscent of Dangerous Liaisons ... The real witchcraft of this book is in its prose. Knight’s Nell, thirstiest of cacti, prickly with sadness, projects her longing, grief, exile, and loneliness onto the object of desire. In each invocatory chapter, you feel the poison and withdrawal symptoms. You believe her desire and her new adult desperation and confusion. You hear her whyyyyyyyyyyy ... The thorn of this book has something to do with this Dangerous Liaisons business, combined with cleverness, combined with Nell’s desire. As the trimesters and chapters wear on, there are times when I wished the shimmer would part so I could land in the narrator’s feelings–about losing a collaborator to poison, about all her former colleagues and friends sleeping with one another and telling each other about it in Bond Villain-style one liners...about what it means that a kind of attraction she didn’t have the words for before is manifesting right now in queer time. If the narrator can be so cleverly flip about these things, I am not sure I can always feel them–if spells, sadness, etc are not felt, I can’t tell if they’re metaphorical or real–and it’s sometimes hard to care.
Nona Caspers
RaveLambda LiteraryIn twenty three connected exquisite moments (or stories) the novel constructs a map of loss, its creative potential, its capacity to tear open the world, trouble boundaries, and dust the daily with wonder. In The Fifth Woman, grief is queer-as-in-odd, as in boundary-blurring, as in otherways loving, as in curious: Shadows come to life, dead deer talk back, a person you know is dead or fictional or both feels realer than anyone you’ve ever loved. To visit this narrator’s grief, a world cracked open by absence, is to find a different way of seeing ... the narrative goes on in the Beckettian sense, every day standing on its own, making its own kind of sense of the world, illuminated by small miraculous quotidian ... Sometimes the novel’s loneliness is so rich, it reads like a mystery to which we keep discovering clues: fragments of letters, a strange face in the mirror, offering hands, a growing crack, as if answers or Michelle or even Jesus might walk out at any moment and explain what’s going on, and how it is that a person can just be gone, and what to do about it ... You come to The Fifth Woman to remember why it is that you make words or stories or art, and the closeness of the creativity of grief to the process of art ... You finish it and then you turn back to the front page and begin again.
