Payback

Starred review from May 25, 2020
Gordon’s excellent latest (after There Your Heart Lies) contrasts the 1970s world of upper-class women’s education with the #MeToo era. Agnes Vaughan and Heidi Stolz meet in the early ’70s at a Rhode Island private girls’ school where Agnes is a young idealistic art teacher and Heidi a troubled student. Agnes tries to give Heidi a confidence-building experience by arranging a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. While viewing Guernica, Heidi flirts with a man who later takes her to his apartment and rapes her. When Heidi tells Agnes what happened, Agnes asks Heidi why she went to the man’s apartment. Heidi, infuriated, runs away. Over time, Heidi reinvents herself as a fitness guru in Arizona, and Agnes moves to Rome and becomes a wife, mother, and art restorer. By 2018, Heidi, under the name Quin Archer, hosts a reality-TV show called Payback. In each episode, Quin exacts justice for someone who has been victimized. Still resentful and in need of a ratings boost, Quin devotes an episode to her rape, making Agnes the target of her revenge, calling her victim-blaming the “true violation,” while a contrite Agnes reflects on how she was too young to be a role model. Gordon nails period details and vividly describes her characters’ worlds, whether they are restoring a work of art or raising a daughter. This mesmerizing novel hits hard.

July 1, 2020
An unhappy interaction between a private school teacher and a difficult student inspires a decadeslong revenge scheme. From the title out, Gordon's 20th book aspires to be a snappy, plot-driven novel with a premise based on reality TV--a socially current, Jodi Picoult-ish type of book. Agnes Vaughan, an art teacher at the Lydia Farnsworth School in New England, tries to embrace an extraordinarily miserable and universally disliked student named Heidi Stolz. But her suggestion that Heidi take a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York leads to a terrible misadventure for Heidi, and her initial reaction to hearing that Heidi went to a strange man's apartment is a bit harsh: "How could you have done that?" These six words set a disastrous course for the rest of both of their lives that culminates in a big, televised shebang several decades (and hundreds of pages) later and then a bunch of additional smaller shebangs as the book keeps refusing to end. Hung on the scaffolding of this silly plot is another sort of book entirely, a deep and dilatory character study of Agnes Vaughan, both her interior life (she is obsessed with the origins of words and the way we use language) and her biography (she quits teaching, moves to Italy, becomes an art restorer, has a child, has a grandchild, moves back to the U.S., all the while suffering continually for her supposed crime against Heidi). Major philosophical digressions abound--about the love of one's work, about the love of one's dog, about motherhood and marriage, about the persistence of "hatred and ugliness" in the world, and much more--and some of these are quite wonderful, but they end up feeling like ballast in the unwieldy mess that is this novel. Despite all Gordon's detailed fleshing-out of the ruminative Agnes, the villainous Heidi is completely nuance-free, with a backstory of Grimm Brothers-style grimness, hateable from the heels of her stilettos to the spiky tips of her hair, from her predilection for vicious lying to her enthusiasm for Ayn Rand. (As bad as she is, her mother is even worse!) And after all this, the ending--the long awaited payback--is unsatisfying, since the truth is never confronted and Agnes is never actually exonerated for her imaginary crime. The marriage of shallow suspense plot and deep character study creates the wrong kind of page-turner.

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Starred review from August 1, 2020
Payback, the reality-TV show starring spiky-haired avenger Quin Archer, is losing its momentum in 2018, so this relentless hunter of betrayers, this vanquisher of victimization, decides to finally reveal her story. The scene switches to a private all-girls school in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1972, where a young, inexperienced art teacher, Agnes Vaughn, tries to mentor Heidi Stolz, an angry rich girl with loathsome and abusive parents and painful family secrets. When Agnes, lovingly raised and enthralled by art and beauty, encourages Heidi to attend a museum lecture in New York, the outing goes disastrously wrong, leading to Heidi's disappearance and Agnes' long, sorrowful repentance. In her ninth novel, virtuoso Gordon (There Your Heart Lies, 2017) creates finely nuanced moral quandaries and explores the deep toxicity of sexism with scintillating energy and piercing inquisitiveness. Complexly villainous Heidi-turned-Quin elicits sympathy and outrage. Agnes is entrancingly poetic in her despair and slow renewal in Rome, where she becomes an art conservator, an apt calling for one who longs to undo harm, in electrifying contrast to vengeance-seeking Quin. Every facet of this psychologically and sensuously lush novel about damage and nurture, altruism and selfishness, disorder and art, privacy and meaningful work, sexual violence and blame, hate and forgiveness poses profound questions about womanhood, how one lives one's life, what truly matters, and what we owe others.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Literary luminary Gordon's novel of two women whose lives are shaped by misogyny and shame will magnetize fiction lovers fascinated by the paradoxes of women's lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

August 28, 2020

Agnes, a young art teacher at an exclusive girls school in Rhode Island, takes an interest in and tries to mentor her truculent student Heidi, who has problematic parents and seems unwilling or unable to mesh well with her classmates. Heidi tentatively accepts Agnes's overtures, but when a tragedy occurs, Agnes fails her at a crucial moment. Overcome by guilt and shame, Agnes, through family connections, relocates to Rome and eventually marries into a wealthy Italian family while pursuing a successful career as an art restorer. After a few years of squalor and struggle, Heidi becomes a successful businesswoman and transforms herself into Quin Archer, host of the ambush-style reality TV show Payback. Decades later, Quin decides it is time to get the "payback" she feels she deserves from Agnes by featuring her own story on the show. VERDICT Award winner Gordon (Final Payments) stacks the deck a bit too much in Agnes's favor, making her eminently likable and sympathetic, despite her undeniable privilege. Heidi/Quin is the clear villain. The moral dilemma could have been more evenhanded, although perhaps that would have undercut Gordon's aim of indicting the glorification of meanness that has seeped into contemporary American culture.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

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