DISCIPLINE

An author upends her book tour to confront the man who changed her life.

Pham’s astute debut novel follows first-time author Christine on her book tour. When she receives an anonymous email (“That’s not how I remember it”), she immediately knows it’s her former art professor, Richard. After a decade of no contact, the email sends her spiraling. She can’t believe he’s read her autofictional, if exaggerated, novel, in which he was the inspiration for the villain. Cleaved into two parts, the novel’s first half follows Christine as she connects with strangers and estranged people from her past on tour stops. In a particularly beautiful and evocative chapter, Christine reunites with her former classmate and friend Frances. Upon discovering that she’s given up painting, Frances asks Christine: “Isn’t it painful?....To abandon a medium. There are so many things I can’t say any other way.” This conversation—imbued with their charged history of intimacy and competitiveness—allows Christine to begin to grapple with her own art: what she created in the past, what she creates now, and what she may create in the future. The novel’s second half takes her to a remote island off the coast of Maine when she accepts Richard’s invitation to come to his home. When she arrives, Christine finds herself shocked by Richard’s rapid aging (“the decade that seems to have collapsed in an instant”). The pain of the past hangs heavy in the air around both of them. Despite herself, Christine feels an uncomfortable mix of fury and pity toward him as they begin to slowly and painfully address the wound at the center of their relationship. The novel simmers with tension and tenderness as Christine ponders the past and comes to terms with the present. Pham’s lithe prose is especially on display in her musings about love, intimacy, power, art, writing, survival, and agency.

A quietly elegant debut from a writer with great promise.