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WIT'S END

by

Karen Joy Fowler

"In fine-edged and discerning prose, she manages to re-create both life's extraordinary and its ordinary magic."

—The New York Times Book Review

"No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness, than she does."

—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

With four previous novels and two short story collections spanning a remarkable variety of genres, Karen Joy Fowler has built a gleaming reputation among readers, critics, and her fellow authors as one of our most entertaining, inventive, and distinctive writers.  With her most recent book, the New York Times bestseller The Jane Austen Book Club, Fowler made the leap from writer's writer and cult favorite to enormous popular success.  A favorite among reading groups and reviewers alike that has been made into a major motion picture, The Jane Austen Book Club surely drew on the enduring appeal of Austen's classic novels.  At its heart, however, it was a wholly contemporary story about the intense and sometimes transforming relationship between readers and characters, reality and fiction.

Now, Fowler returns to print with WIT'S END (G. P. Putnam's Sons/ Marian Wood; Publication Date: April 1, 2008; ISBN: 978-0-399-15475-1; Price: $24.95), a new novel that at first glance may seem utterly divergent from The Jane Austen Book Club.  An ingenious puzzle box of mysteries within mysteries that borrows many of the conventions of detective and gothic fiction for its framework, it involves a young woman's search for the truth about her beloved father, who may or may not have killed a man; her conflicted relationship with her godmother, a celebrated mystery writer; and the writer's perennial quest to craft engaging and genuinely imaginative fiction.  Taking up in different guise many of the same themes Fowler investigated in her earlier fiction, WIT'S END "amounts to a witty meditation on how the books we choose, choose us too," as the San Francisco Chronicle wrote of The Jane Austen Book Club.

Rima Lanisell, a high school teacher from Ohio on the cusp of thirty, has lost so much over the past few years – her long-term boyfriend, after a breast cancer scare; her only sibling, Oliver, in a single-car crash;  and her father, Bim Lanisell, to leukemia.  It seems a propitious time to accept a longstanding invitation to visit her godmother, the internationally recognized mystery writer A. B. Early, known to intimates as Addison.  So Rima settles in for an indefinite stay on the top floor of Wit's End, Addison's atmospheric old house – once owned by a survivor of the Donner Party – overlooking the Pacific in Santa Cruz, California.

Rima feels as if she has stepped into one of Addison's books, particularly since evidence of them lies all around her.  Addison can't start a new book until she gets the murder scene just right, which she achieves by constructing an exquisitely detailed dollhouse depicting each homicide.  It's been five years since her last mystery came out, and her obsessive fans – and maybe the sixty-something Addison herself—are beginning to wonder if she's petering out.  But Rima is more concerned with one of Addison's previous books, Ice City, in which a character named for her father not only kills his wife with a cat, but brings about the death of another innocent.  Were her father and Addison ever more than just good pals, Rima wonders?  What was the cause of their estrangement?  And why does Rima have wild sexual fantasies about Addison's handsome detective hero, Maxwell Lane, who is of course the nemesis of Bim Lanisell the character?

In spite of herself, Rima is quickly drawn into the domestic intrigues at Wit's End – the alternating motherliness and hostility of Addison's housekeeper, Tilda, a formerly homeless woman who is secretly writing a memoir of her life with the renowned writer; the bumpy romance of Scorch and Cody, the two college students who walk Addison's irrepressible brother-and-sister dachshunds, Stanford and Berkeley; and the unwelcome advances of Tilda's shiftless son, Martin.  What she doesn't see or hear first-hand, she soon picks up from everyone's blogs.  "Why can't they just read?," Addison laments.

When a brazen crime takes place at Wit's End–the theft of the tiny corpse from the dollhouse for Addison's book Spook Juice–Rima sets out to solve the case.  Ominously, the trail leads to an abandoned community ironically called Holy City, which was once home to a white supremacist cult that figures prominently in Addison's novel Ice City.  In a frightening confrontation in a derelict house, Rima obtains information that may enable her answer at least some of the questions she has been posing.

Just as important, Rima's detective work leads her to a deeper understanding of Ice City, which is an imaginary place even in the context of Addison's book.  Ice City is a state of mind, a psychological destination, a place where Maxwell Lane retreats when he can't face the world as it is.   It's a made-up bar where made-up drinks are served to made-up people – people from Maxwell's past, the famous, the infamous, the real, the fictional, the living, the dead.  And it's a place that Rima's father claimed to go, as well, when he couldn't deal with the things he'd seen as a reporter, or the needs of a sensitive young woman seeking an honest relationship with her father.

The work of one of our most talented, playful, and challenging novelists at the very top of her form, WIT'S END is at once a sheer marvel of storytelling, an absorbing series of mysteries, and a captivating literary puzzler.  An equally dazzling successor to Karen Joy Fowler's brilliantly acclaimed The Jane Austen Book Club, it will delight her devoted readers as it both confirms and confounds their expectations, while also expanding her ever-growing audience.

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Wit's End
By Karen Joy Fowler
Marian Wood/G. P. Putnam's Sons
Publication Date:  April 1, 2008
Price:  $24.95
ISBN:  978-0-399-15475-1