Undone

February 29, 2016
New Yorker staffer Colapinto’s novel (after About the Author) is an over-the-top, irreverent, and darkly comical thriller. Dez, an ephebophile and convicted sex offender, has been fired from a high-school teaching job for being romantically involved with a 17-year-old student named Chloe. Unemployed, dejected, and hiding from the authorities in a northern Vermont trailer park, he passes time watching an Oprah-esque TV show called Tovah in the Afternoon. While watching the program one day, Dez learns from Chloe that her recently deceased mother had a brief summer flame with mystery-writer-cum-bestselling-memoirist Jasper Ulrickson roughly nine months before she was born. With this information in mind, Dez conjures a ruinous scheme to land the orphan Chloe under the wealthy Ulrickson’s custody, so she can seduce him into incestuous relations, file charges to claim monetary compensation, and in turn destroy his reputation. The wily Dez is able to pull the necessary strings to set the plan in motion, but an unlikely and absurd series of twists follows, leaving no character unscathed. Aggressively offensive and deliberately silly in its treatment of stock characters, scenarios, and tropes, Colapinto’s novel oscillates between highly ironic and deeply earnest treatments of this taboo subject matter. The story tackles sexual and moral dilemmas that are worth contemplating, delivering them at a breakneck and often entertaining pace.

February 1, 2016
A bestselling author is caught in a web of psychological manipulation, sexual taboo, and financial ruin. The second novel by veteran magazine writer Colapinto (About the Author, 2001, etc.) is a speedy tale about the personal and professional demolition of Jasper, who's become a celebrity via a memoir about caring for his wife, who suffered a debilitating stroke while giving birth to their daughter. Elsewhere, 17-year-old Chloe catches Jasper on an Oprah-esque show and immediately recognizes him as somebody her late mother had a brief fling with. Her boyfriend, Dez, who's hit the skids thanks to his taste in just-underage girls like Chloe, conceives a plot to improve their fortunes: convince Jasper that Chloe is his daughter (though she knows she's not), have her use her feminine wiles to seduce him, then reap Jasper's fortune after an incest-rape scandal. Colapinto's plotting (DNA sample switcheroos, etc.) at times strains credibility, and there are stretches of purple prose. ("Her body was so precariously perched between foal-like childhood and the full, fecund effulgence of erotically charged womanhood.") But his pacing is expert, and Chloe's seduction scheme isn't played solely for titillation--Colapinto means to explore male sexual obsession, from the morality of pornography to the illegality of Dez's fixation to America's go-away-a-little-closer attitude toward youthful sexuality and erotic confession. These gray areas aren't especially gray: Jasper is plainly a wronged victim, and Dez is plainly sadistic. But in the climactic chapters, Colapinto enjoys pushing both men to their extremes, befitting a plot that has echoes of a Greek tragedy. There are enough loose ends to suggest a sequel--Jasper himself wrote a series of Sherlock-ian mysteries before hitting the memoir jackpot. But the novel stands solidly on its own. A well-machined page-turner that brings some smarts to a touchy subject.

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Starred review from February 15, 2016
New Yorker staff writer and award-winning author Colapinto's darkly witty and sordidly satirical tale features upstanding Jasper Ulrickson, a mystery writer enjoying modest success with a cozy series featuring a blind detective, until, while delivering their only child, his editor wife has a stroke that leaves her immobilized and reduced to communicating by blinking. Jasper writes a heartrending memoir about her predicament and his devotion to her, which becomes a runaway best-seller, propelling him to the set of a smarmy, megapopular TV talk show, which brings him to the warped attention of a sociopath. Dez's lust for teenage girls has destroyed his legal and teaching careers. Holed up in a rotting trailer with beautiful, young, orphaned Chloe, he concocts a diabolical plan to shame and annihilate the heroically kind Jasper. As his detestable villain orchestrates X-rated, Job-like agonies for gentle Jasper, Colapinto, with sardonic zest and mesmerizing intensity, cracks open the underworlds of sexual predation and incest. Cannily over the top in its comic depravity and magnetizing in its sympathy, Colapinto's battle royal of innocence and evil, blindness and illumination, betrayal and love will thrill those who enjoy subversively erotic and suspenseful fiction of the finest execution and most cutting implications.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)