cover image Private Correspondences

Private Correspondences

Trudy Lewis. Triquarterly Books, $24 (198pp) ISBN 978-0-8101-5033-1

Winner of TriQuarterly's 1994 William Goyen prize for fiction, this powerful debut novel explores the hidden niches of cruelty, lust, political corruption and misogyny. Narrator Libby Martin, daughter of a state senator, is 15 when she receives an anonymous obscene letter threatening her with rape and mutilation. The missive changes her life and her perceptions of her family and friends. In a course of painful discoveries, she confronts her father's duplicitous adulteries, her mother's frustrated obsessions with order and cleanliness and a friend's betrayal of trust and loyalty. Finally, in a violent and sexually graphic conclusion, she gains a form of empowerment. With perfectly pitched dialogue and a story grounded in details of contemporary manners and mores-from rock music to sexual harassment in the political arena-Lewis's shattering study of sexual violence and individual vulnerability is both timely and universally resonant. (Sept.)