Motion Sickness by Lynne Tillman Page A

baffling freedoms and uncertainties… Childhood fears, passionate friendships, sexual explorations, and the uncomfortable interdependency of parents and children are depicted with intelligence, honesty, and dark humor. But if you are looking for comfort and consolation, you must look elsewhere: Tillman writes about life as it is, not as we might wish it to be.”
—
Times
(UK)
“Lynne Tillman’s writing uncovers hidden truths, reveals the unnamable, and leads us into her personal world of pain, pleasure, laughter, fear and confusion, with a clarity of style that is both remarkable and exhilarating. Honest. Simple. Deep. Authentic. Daring… To read her is, in a sense, to become alive, because she lives so thoroughly in her work. Lynne Tillman is, quite simply, one of the best writers alive today.”
— John Zorn
“Lynne Tillman’s haunted houses are Freudian ones—the psyches of three girls, Emily, Jane, and Grace, each wrestling with the psychological ‘ghosts’ that shape them… Frequently shifting points of view are expressed in crisp sentences. Rather than forming a modernist stream of consciousness, however, the writing remains controlled.”
— Lucy Atkins ,
Times Literary Supplement
Cast in Doubt
     
    While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end.
    That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious—in short, she becomes his absolute obsession.
    But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.
“Clever, witty, passionately written… Lynne Tillman writes with such elan, such spirited delight and comic intelligence that it is difficult to take anything but pleasure…”
— Douglas Glover ,
Washington Post Book World
“With
Cast in Doubt
, Lynne Tillman achieves several different kinds of miracles. She moves into the skin of a sixtyish male homosexual novelist so effortlessly that the reader immediately loses sight of the illusion and accepts the narrator as a real person. Alongside the narrator we move into the gossipy, enclosed world of English and American artists and madmen living in Crete, and at every step, as the play of consciousness suggests, alerts, and alters, are made aware of a terrible chaos that seems only just out of sight. But what impresses me most about
Cast in Doubt
is the great and powerful subtlety with which it peers out of itself—Tillman’s intelligence and sophistication have led her toward a quality I can only call grace. Like Stein, Ashbery, and James, this book could be read over and over, each time with deepening delight and appreciation.”
— Peter Straub
“Tingly, crisp, and wry… Delightfully clever and probing.”
— Donna Seaman ,
Booklist
“Tillman's evocation of Horace and his life among ruins both geographic and aesthetic is a tour de force.
Cast in Doubt
recasts every genre it touches—the expatriate novel, the mystery, the novel of ideas—like a multiply haunted house of both form and identity.”
—
Voice Literary Supplement
, Best Books of 1992
“If you can keep up with him, Horace will take you all kinds of places… I was