The conceit could come off as gimmicky, but it doesn’t; Craig’s narrative is masterful and self-assured. Her greatest accomplishment, though, is the character of Tessa ... It’s a risk to have such a resolutely unsympathetic character as the nexus of a narrative, but Craig sketches Tessa beautifully, acknowledging her humanity but making clear her capacity for monstrous actions ... Artful in its prose and unsparing in the way it looks at envy and its corrosive effects, My Nemesis is a riveting novel about the stories people tell themselves to justify their shortcomings and what happens when they start to believe these lies.
Tessa, the narrator of My Nemesis, proves it’s possible to be delightfully pretentious ... That readers can see past Tessa’s narration to her failures is the first delicious trick in Charmaine Craig’s new novel, which has a few up its sleeve ... This is also a novel of ideas, where people debate motives, values, femininity, motherhood ... Tessa is a brilliant cross between the autobiographical fiction of Rachel Cusk and the untrustworthy narrator Charles Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Her narration is revealing and not; her pomposity is porous, funny ... With a narrator who is utterly convinced of her own rightness, there will be more twists and surprises. But those I can’t spoil. They’re too good.
The logic of Craig’s premise is sound; a martini-fueled middle-class woman attacking her peer at a scene-y restaurant could be the juicy opening of a new HBO series ... Regrettably, the promising themes — attraction, identity, rivalry, betrayal and the seemingly Sisyphean quest for creative and interpersonal fulfillment — become mired in a series of distracting subplots ... Rather than fusing into a profound or playfully provocative meditation on the limits of perspective in both writing and life, the characters’ relationships and conflicts feel bound more by proximity than by narrative resonance. The most compelling moments occur when the reader is prompted to scrutinize the narrator’s point of view and, by extension, the occlusions of the memoir form ... The final third of My Nemesis reads like a race to justify its own conceits ... My Nemesis spends so much time resolving its own mysteries that it loses narrative vitality along the way.
For a confrontation like this to work, both sides need to be equally armed with strengths and foibles, and the problem is that Tessa is among the most one-dimensionally obnoxious characters I’ve ever encountered. She’s bossy and condescending but also pathetically thin-skinned ... Is there a more reflexively mocked figure in the entire republic of letters than the privileged, white, middle-aged, female memoirist? To make Tessa interesting, Ms. Craig would need to cut against those biases and conjure some kind of brilliant, Promethean rebel stalking the groves of academe. Now that would be magical storytelling.
As distant and self-assured as Tessa is, Craig never lets her first-person narrator off the hook, as she must acknowledge her own role in the disintegration of every meaningful relationship she has ... Cerebral and tense.
Swift and cutting ... The writing is biting and propulsive as allegiances shift and Tessa realizes she’s misjudged Wah. This confident work is sure to spark conversations.
