Nine Island

Starred review from June 20, 2016
The narrator of Alison’s (The Love-Artist) wonderful novel, J, lives alone in the paradise of a Miami Beach high-rise condo. J spends most of her days going to the pool, working on translating (or “transmuting”) Ovid’s stories, sitting on her balcony, and watching her neighbors in a building across the way. She’s been contacting some of her various lovers from the past, whom she refers to as “Sir Gold,” “The Devil,” and other monikers—but none of them lead to anything serious. As she contemplates retiring from love for good, she cares for her aging cat, Buster, and a duck stranded on a traffic median. She befriends her enigmatic and troubled neighbors on the floor above her and becomes further and further entangled with them. Maybe it’s due to the oppressive heat or her active imagination, but Ovid and Miami begin to blur: she sees Ovid’s girls (as the narrator refers to them) in the trees, people who transform, and symbols everywhere. J faces a certain ennui: she is alone, she lacks a mate, yet her inner life is a vivid struggle to find happiness, to connect with the world outside her apartment. Yet how can she live without pleasure? With echoes of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea, Alison has forged a haunting and emotionally precise portrait, a beautiful reminder that solitude does not equal loneliness. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary.

July 1, 2016
This immersive, cerebral novel centers on J, a woman teetering on the balance between the concrete, sometimes grim responsibilities of her daily life and an equally urgent personal dilemma: should she "retire" from love and romance?Memoirist, translator, and novelist Alison (The Sisters Antipodes, 2009, etc.) sets a surreal scene: a Miami beachfront apartment building, a "musty old Love Boat," where the structure and many of its residents are in the process of death and decay. J lives on the 21st floor in a box-shaped flat with cork floors and mirrored walls. Her building, a large block consisting of smaller blocks, is mirrored by the building across the way, where she witnesses scenes of human connection and disconnection, innocent and otherwise. Everyone in this book is known only by their first initial or their role, such as "my mother" or "Par-T-Boy," contributing to the sense of disconnection J and the reader experience together. In her cube, J embarks on a project similar to Alison's own book Change Me (2014), translating sex stories by Ovid into English. As she works, she considers giving up on sex and romantic life after the end of a 10-year marriage and a tour of exes, culminating in one month spent with "Sir Gold," the one who got away, who doesn't want her back anymore. Her intellectual life is punctuated by obligatory dates with local suitors, an ailing mother, an incontinent cat, and a newly formed friendship with a neighbor couple. She ventures out to swim laps in the building's hourglass-shaped pool and walk the beach, where she feeds and attempts to rescue a wounded duck. While narrating her own story, J acknowledges she's speaking to an audience, but her stories don't form an epic tale; rather, they are a series of short chapters, elliptical dips into and out of experiences past and present. Evocative, sad, at times funny, and never completely without hope, a story that studies what it means to be alone later in life.

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November 15, 2016

J lives in a glass high-rise on one of Miami Beach's alluring Venetian Islands and is seriously thinking of giving up men. In midlife herself, she's seen her now ailing mother flop at many relationships, and she's just returned from a visit with Sir Gold (as she dubs him), an old flame who had seemed interested in reigniting their passion but after a month decides it's not to be and rather casually dismisses her. Meanwhile, she's translating Ovid, which leads not only to some absorbingly sensuous passages but also sharp, lyrical reflections on physical intimacy and the nature of female sexuality as both need and burden; here, we see mythic characters fleeing violation of body and self. Yet as a friend says, "If you retire from love, ...then you retire from life." VERDICT Novelist/memoirist Alison, also a translator of Ovid's stories of sexual transformation, has written an autobiographical novel-cum-meditation that many readers, and not just women, will find intriguing. Passion matters, and who doesn't contemplate somehow moving forward?

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2016
Readers know her only as J, a woman of a certain age, once married, currently single, and longing for love. Or at least, lust. Love is through with her, but J can't decide if she's through with it. Renting an apartment in a crumbling high-rise overlooking Miami's Crayola-hued Venetian Islands, J cares for her aging cat, tries to tend to her out-of-state, invalid mother, and attempts to save an injured duck found near the causeway. When not pining over loves lost and those yet-to-be, J translates the works of Ovid, giving them a contemporary spin that often mirrors her fantasies of erotic rescue and resuscitation. Emotionally scarred and wary, J finds an unlikely alliance in P and N, the husband-and-wife upstairs neighbors, and relies upon N's pithy advice about the wisdom of giving up too soon. Alison (The Sisters Antipodes, 2009) offers shrewd and clever commentary on the sexual and sensual needs of mature women, an oft-overlooked aspect of the aging process, in this canny and nimble novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)