The Deceptions

A Novel

by Jill Bialosky

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Pub Date Sep 06 2022 | Archive Date Sep 01 2022

Catapult, Counterpoint Press, and Soft Skull Press | Counterpoint

General Fiction (Adult)

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Description

An explosive tale of art and myth, desire and betrayal, from New York Times best-selling author Jill Bialosky

Something terrible has happened and I don’t know what to do. An unnamed narrator’s life is unraveling. Her only child has left home, and her twenty-year marriage is strained. Anticipation about her soon-to-be-released book of poetry looms. She seeks answers to the paradoxes of love, desire, and parenthood among the Greek and Roman gods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As she passes her days teaching at a boys’ prep school, spending her off-hours sequestered in the museum's austere galleries, she is haunted by memories of a yearlong friendship with a colleague, a fellow poet struggling with his craft. As secret betrayals and deceptions come to light and rage threatens to overwhelm her, the pantheon of gods assume remarkably vivid lives of their own, forcing her to choose between reality and myth in an effort to free herself from the patriarchal constraints of the past and embrace a new vision for her future.

The Deceptions is a page-turning and seductively told exploration of female sexuality and ambition as well as a human drama that dares to test the stories we tell ourselves. It is also a brilliant investigation of a life caught between the dueling magnetic poles of privacy and its appropriation in art and literature. Celebrated poet, memoirist, and novelist Jill Bialosky has reached new and daring heights in her boldest work yet.

Advance Praise

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year

“In The Deceptions Jill Bialosky captures the gutted hollow of the empty nest, the weight of marriage, and the ember of desire that is desperate for air. Bialosky explores the female artist’s need to take risks, to be seen and known, against her need for comfort, safety, and home. In stunning, finely tuned prose, Bialosky captures the music of marriage, the complexity of female ambition, sexual hunger, and rage. This story unfurls in a beautiful weave among objects from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Myth, archetype, and history come to life and in the end we are returned to the present—this moment—and the question of what it is to be human, to risk, to fail, to suffer the pain of love.”

—A.M. Homes

“At once classical and contemporary, Jill Bialosky's powerful new novel weaves together themes of art and life, sexuality and family, gender dynamics and selfhood. The Deceptions is urgent, unsettling, and utterly consuming—a triumph.”

—Claire Messud

“I was immediately swept away by this searing, elegant portrait of a woman in a place of psychological and emotional precarity. Jill Bialosky brings us with great delicacy and arresting sensuality into a world which becomes so real we cannot look away. The Deceptions is at once mesmerizing and masterful.”

—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

"Poetry and inspiration, obsession and divinity, all come under Bialosky’s purview in her elegantly constructed fable of trying to create while everything else falls apart."

—Ed Simon, The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year

“In The Deceptions Jill Bialosky captures the gutted hollow of the empty nest, the weight of marriage...