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Starred review from February 15, 2023
A graduate student descends into madness while contemplating the relationship between the celebrated novelist James Joyce and his daughter in this labyrinthine literary mystery. Lombardi's novel centers on a woman who lands in a Baltimore mental hospital in 1993, where she responds to questions with enigmatic quotations from Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce. She is diagnosed with schizophrenia and identified as Molly O'Donnell, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University--hence the compulsive literary allusions--and the daughter of deceased Joyce scholar Will O'Donnell. Family, friends, and staffers try to coax her out of her psychosis but with little success. When she's not in a medicated stupor, she's acting out by starting fires or trying to seduce a male nurse. Interspersed with Molly's travails in the psych ward are diary entries she wrote before her psychotic break. These cover her affairs with a married professor and a concert violinist; her vexed relationships with her alcoholic mother, domineering brother, and fragile sister; and her dissertation on the similarities between Joyce's famously incoherent novel Finnegans Wake and the language used by schizophrenics. Her research zeroes in on Joyce's daughter, Lucia, a schizophrenic whose symptoms mirror those Molly will display in the hospital. She theorizes that the woman's disjointed utterances inspired Finnegans Wake and starts seeing apparitions of a derelict Lucia. Molly eventually plunges into sinister conjectures about Joyce's relationship with his daughter, which start to color her memories of Will. Lombardi's sprawling novel is an intense, well-observed portrait of a psychiatric patient and the obsessions that slowly undermine her sanity; an engrossing picture of literary sleuthing; a cri de coeur against intimate predations; and a moving depiction of a family torn by ugly secrets. The author's prose has a vivid immediacy, whether she's registering intense emotion--"How can you breathe when your lungs keep collapsing on you, like the emphysema of some five-pack-a-day smoker?" wonders Molly after a lover blithely dumps her--or a reflective lyricism. (A patient "walked alongside Molly, speaking softly to her; as they passed under the weeping willow trees Molly's face was childlike, upturned, her slow movements for once acquiring something resembling grace.") The result is a very Joycean exploration of a troubled psyche revealed in evocative prose. A richly textured and deeply felt tale of life and tragedy turned into art.

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