Bad Marie Paperback – June 22, 2010

Description

From Publishers Weekly Dermansky follows her lauded debut, Twins, with a trite tail about an ex-con's unlikely re-entry to the world. After serving six years for harboring a fugitive--her bank robber boyfriend--30-year-old Marie is released and misses the decisionless ease of prison life. She finds work as a live-in nanny (nothing like a felon watching your pride and joy) for two-and-a-half-year-old Caitlin, the daughter of her childhood best friend, Ellen, with whom she has a rocky, competitive relationship. In a hard-to-believe coincidence, Ellen is married to the French author, Benoît Doniel, whose book Marie read repeatedly while in prison, and soon enough, Benoît and Marie kick off an affair and decide to run away to Paris together with Caitlin. But when Benoît's true colors are displayed before even landing in the City of Lights (thanks to another unbelievable coincidence), Marie finds herself taking on the role of a single mother in a strange land, though her travails never really impede on her relatively charmed streak. It's off-putting how heavily the plot relies on implausible twists, and Marie is too sketchily drawn to carry the full weight of the story. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist Dermansky follows her bold debut, Twins (2005), with a wickedly nihilistic and suspenseful tale of erotic mayhem. Impulsive, larcenous, and utterly self-absorbed, not to mention vampishly beautiful, Marie rather liked prison, where she could read her favorite book, a novel by a French author named Benoît Doniel, over and over. Her handsome young Mexican lover and inept accomplice hung himself in jail, and her mother won't even pick her up, so upon her release, Marie heads for her old friend Ellen's swanky New York apartment. Smug Ellen knows how dangerous Marie is, yet she desperately needs a nanny for her precocious toddler daughter, Caitlin. As for her husband, it's none other than Benoît Doniel. Bewitching and commanding, Dermansky creates a template for either a comedy of sexual errors or an all-out tragedy, then keeps readers guessing until the very end. Set in New York, Paris, the Riviera, and Mexico, this is an edgy, speedy, stylish, unpredictable, funny, and heart-stopping tale of a damaged soul who finally finds love in the clear-eyed intelligence, trust, and joy of a child. --Donna Seaman Read more Review “Marcy Dermansky’s slim picaresque follows the misadventures of a nanny who absconds to Paris with her charge and the toddler’s dashing father. Marie is the amoral engineer of multiple train wrecks, but in Dermansky’s hands she’s somehow irresistible.” (Time magazine)“Dermansky does proud the long, often sketchy, sometimes illustrious tradition of transgressive fiction with BAD MARIE . . . Her Marie is no cry-baby Anna Karenina fated to a star-crossed love for which she pays with her life.” (Elle)“Not enough women write novels like this one. Dermansky is funny and fearless. I like Marie so much because she seems to care so little whether I like her or not. That’s a working definition of badass. Bad Marie is one.” (Esquire)“[Marie is] an antiheroine for our time . . . A page-turning melodrama told with chilled cosmopolitan irony, the moral puzzles at the heart of BAD MARIE linger after the delicious meringue of the book has been consumed. Cool trick, Ms. Dermansky.” (Newsday)“Deliciously wicked.” (Slate)“I didn’t want to finish this book any time soon, didn’t want to emerge from its dark and wondrous world. My God, what a writer -- absolutely unpredictable, wild with intellect, spilling with charm and sadness and humanity. Marie, the main character here, is literary gold, worthy of Flaubert.” (Mary Robison)“Marcy Dermansky’s BAD MARIE is so very very bad that I enjoyed every word. A tour de force in mounting suspense as its witless narrator and the baby she’s stolen careen from one all-too-probable disaster to the next. Delicious.” (Terese Svoboda, author of Cannibal and Pirate Talk or Mermelade)“By positing a character who’s indulged in all of the deadly sins, Dermansky challenges the reader to finally and forever denounce her character Marie. The fact that this reader can’t is testament to the book’s power and smarts. A naughty pleasure, a philosophical romp, heady hedonism: what could be better?” (Antonya Nelson, author of Nothing Right)“[BAD MARIE is] sinful in all the right ways, delicate, seditious, and deliciously evil.” (Frederick Barthelme)“Marcy Dermansky makes it easy to love Marie, a husband-stealing, baby-snatching, underachieving ex-con . . . Fast-paced and unsentimental, BAD MARIE blazes with life.” (Barb Johnson, author of More of This World or Maybe Another) Read more From the Back Cover Bad Marie is the story of Marie, tall, voluptuous, beautiful, thirty years old, and fresh from six years in prison for being an accessory to murder and armed robbery. The only job Marie can get on the outside is as a nanny for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall, an upwardly mobile Manhattan executive whose mother employed Marie's mother as a housekeeper. After Marie moves in with Ellen, Ellen's angelic baby Caitlin, and Ellen's husband, a very attractive French novelist named Benoit Doniel, things get complicated, and almost before she knows what she's doing, Marie has absconded to Paris with both Caitlin and Benoit Doniel. On the run and out of her depth, Marie will travel to distant shores and experience the highs and lows of foreign culture, lawless living, and motherhood as she figures out how to be an adult; how deeply she can love; and what it truly means to be "bad". Read more About the Author Marcy Dermansky is a MacDowell Fellow and the winner of the 2002 Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award and the 1999 Story magazine’s Carson McCullers short story prize. Her stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including McSweeney’s, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Indiana Review. Dermansky is a film critic for About.com and lives in Astoria, New York. Read more