The Vices

June 20, 2011
Douglas (The Catastrophist) delivers a probing and skillful examination of the conundrums of identity, with philosopher Oliver Vice providing the subject, and the unnamed narrator, Oliver's colleague and best friend, serving as the examiner. After opening with an account of 41-year-old Oliver's death by drowning on a transatlantic voyage aboard the Queen Mary 2 (accident or suicide?), the narrator describes Oliver's meteoric rise fueled by his book, Paradoxes of Self; his tenured appointment at Harkness College in western Massachusetts, where the two meet; his unusual family and unorthodox relationships with women. Almost all the "facts" the narrator knows of Oliver's life are either wrong or subject to various interpretations so that his identity always remains elusive and in flux. The repeated irony of Oliver and the narrator being mistaken for one another despite their dissimilar appearances is prelude to a masterfully kaleidoscopic shift that presents the reader with a stunning new vista.

July 1, 2011
Pulled into the orbit of the enigmatic, alluring Vice family years earlier, an unnamed narrator probes into the clan after the deathaccident or suicideof his best friend, Oliver Vice, 41, during an Atlantic crossing by the QM2. The two men met on the faculty of a northeastern liberal arts college, at which Oliver, hired with tenure in the wake of a renowned book on free will, taught philosophy, and the narrator, on the strength of his well-received first novel, was writer in residence. Witty and stylish Oliver unwittingly ruined his friend's marriage and left five grieving ex-lovers in his wake, and he becomes a puzzle to be solved in terms of both his life and his death. Primary questions concern provenance, that of the art owned by Oliver and his mother and that of the Vice family itself, for the stories Oliver's mother tells don't add up. Ultimately, there is the question of how much the truth matters. An intriguing, thought-provoking exploration of a man desperately unhappy to be living his own life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)