Hex

December 23, 2019
A young academic develops an unhealthy fixation on her adviser in this arresting novel of obsession from Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night). Nell Barber is expelled from her PhD program in botany at Columbia University, along with the rest of her lab members, after their colleague Rachel Simons dies from exposure to poisonous plants. Nell breaks up with her medievalist boyfriend Tom, gets a job at a bar, and concentrates on completing Rachel’s dangerous work in her apartment to capture the attention of former adviser Joan Kallas, with whom she is obsessed. While Joan tries to steer Nell away from the dangerous project, Joan starts up an affair with Tom, and Nell’s best friend, the gorgeous, high-achieving Mishti, sleeps with Joan’s husband. The narrative takes the form of entries in what is supposed to be Nell’s scientific notebook (which are addressed to Joan), in which Nell discusses the main players’ love affairs and tries to reach conclusions about her would-be mentor. After the details of the affairs emerge at a small holiday party at Joan’s home, Nell loses her chance at an invitation to join Joan’s new research project. Nell’s intensity and the hypnotic, second-person prose convincingly render the protagonist’s bewitched, self-destructive state. Readers who liked I Love Dick and want something more lurid will appreciate this. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler.

January 15, 2020
A tale of poison and obsession set amid the toxic halls of academe. Expelled from her graduate program in biological science after a lab-mate dies, a victim of the group's toxicological experiments, Nell Barber is left obsessed and unmoored. Though once she'd been focused on oak trees, she is now consumed by the need to finish the dead girl's project to "neutralize botanical toxins," to combine the poison and its antidote. Now it is Nell's mission, working alone in the exile of her Brooklyn apartment, to build "a poison that undoes itself." Yet it is not the work that is at the heart of her obsession but her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas. The novel itself is a series of journal entries, all addressed to her absent beloved. "As with the old work, the new work is for you, Joan," Nell writes. "What isn't for you?" The rest of Nell's world is populated with Joan-adjacent players. There is Joan's husband, Barry, the self-important and useless Associate Director of Columbia Undergraduate Residence Halls--less a threat to Nell than a man-shaped afterthought--and Nell's two best friends, Tom and Mishti, who, as students in good standing, still have access to the privilege of Joan's presence, both enrolled as nondepartmental students in her class. Mishti is a beautiful chemist; Tom is a beautiful medieval and Renaissance historian and also Nell's ex-boyfriend. Soon, all six of them are intertwined, a web of sex and betrayal, with Joan (always) at the center. It is a lush and brooding novel, over-the-top in its foreboding, with Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) walking the delicate line--mostly successfully--between the Grecian and the absurd. As a string of weirdly mannered sentences, it is a joyfully deranged pleasure; as a novel, though, the experience is frustratingly hollow, populated by characters who only come to life in the book's final third. Admirably bold if sometimes hard to care about.

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February 15, 2020
Expelled from her botany PhD program after one of her labmates' dies from exposure to poison, Nell is in a tender place. She and her longtime boyfriend, Tom, also just broke up, but Nell's sharpest heartbreak comes from the necessary rupture with her advisor, Joan. Also the designee of Nell's journals, which comprise this book, Joan is a confident, elegant, powerful scholar who knows what to do with her shoulders compared to Nell's pudding cup of a person. As Nell's first season as a nonstudent becomes spring and then summer, love affairs zigzag among Joan, Joan's husband, Tom, and Nell's best friend, while Nell pines for Joan but connects most deeply with her journals and Joan's dog, Amanda. There's much, it turns out, that Nell can't let go of. Poking at the membranes between poisons and their antidotes, monuments and their ruins, and life and death, Nell's confessional word-tumbles are this book's most special feature. Knight (The Sunlit Night, 2015) writes in a distinctive, addictive, and poetic style in which every sentence provokes and nothing is predictable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)