THE SEDUCTION

A photographer and a writer circle each other in a cottage on the coast of Catalonia.

The photographer has come to this little house an hour outside Barcelona to photograph the writer for a series about women artists at work. The two connected when the photographer, enraptured by the author’s portrait on the cover of her novel, reached out and suggested this collaboration. But the project is mostly a gesture, a vehicle to carry them forward to the intimacy the photographer craves with the writer she has idealized. Once at the cottage, her “seduction” is the only goal, a project apparently disrupted by the presence of a third person, a close friend of the writer’s and the novel’s only named character, Greta. The photographer is younger than the others, 32, and her first-person narration is full of her insecurities, her ambivalence about her body, her desire for the writer, and her theories of seduction. Before meeting in person, correspondence between author and photographer hinted at blossoming romance, but in person, their interactions feel cold and distant, and the photographer perseverates over her stymied appetites. When, two-thirds of the way through the novel, sections of the writer’s notebook join the narrative, her more mature perspective—she is 50—invites much-needed air into the story. Torres has a Ph.D. in theories of lesbian queer desire and fetish, and her scholarship is evident throughout the novel, to the extent that the characters often end up feeling more like psychological models than actual people. There’s a lot to be said for this: Their interactions are thought provoking and musings on desire, appetite, power, jealousy, the gaze, childhood, body image, and queer sexuality are frequently illuminating. However, the work as a whole does not function as transportive fiction.

Adroit in theory, a bit tiresome in practice.