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    Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
    Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
    Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
    Ebook332 pages5 hours

    Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather

    By Jincy Willett

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the National Book Award, the long-awaited novel from the author of the acclaimed collection, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, is an unusual and wonderful novel that is somehow able to be at once bleak and hilarious, light-hearted and profound.

    It's the story of two sisters. Abigail Mather is a woman of enormous appetites, sexual and otherwise. Her fraternal twin Dorcas couldn't be more different: she gave up on sex without once trying it, and she lives a controlled, dignified life of the mind. Though Abigail exasperates Dorcas, the two love each other; in fact, they complete each other. They are an odd pair, set down in an odd Rhode Island town, where everyone has a story to tell, and writers, both published and unpublished, carom off each other like billiard balls.

    What is it that makes the two women targets for the new man in town, the charming schlockmeister Conrad Lowe, tall, whippet-thin and predatory? In Abigail and Dorcas he sees a new and tantalizing challenge. Not the mere conquest of Abigail, with her easy reputation, but a longer and more sinister game. A game that will lead to betrayal, shame and, ultimately, murder.

    In her darkly comic and unsettling first novel, Jincy Willett proves that she is a true find: that rare writer who can explore the shadowy side of human nature with the lightest of touches.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2010
    ISBN9781429982382
    Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather
    Author

    Jincy Willett

    Jincy Willett is the author of Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, and The Writing Class, which have been translated and sold internationally. Her stories have been published in Cosmopolitan, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and other magazines. She frequently reviews for The New York Times Book Review. A resident of Escondido, California, Willett spends her days parsing the sentences of total strangers and her nights teaching and writing.

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    Reviews for Winner of the National Book Award

    3.5/5

    145 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I think people should ignore every blurb that's on the cover of this book. It is emphatically not the funniest novel I've ever read, or even close -- Augusten Burroughs and I have different ideas of what "funny" means, maybe? -- but I nonetheless thought it was very good.

      I also don't know why people call this a dark comedy, either. There's a particular person's death foreshadowed throughout, but that death in and of itself isn't much of a joke. I actually was a little bit glad of the death; there was an element of justice to it that was pretty clear all along.

      The narrator is a crabby spinster librarian, somehow not quite cliche, and hugely enjoyable to read. I'm not sure everyone would embrace her as completely as I did, but I responded to her sarcasm, and to her abiding love of books, immediately.
    • 1/5
      Best thing about this book is it's title.
    • 3/5
      Definitely kept me reading. I really liked the conceit of the book's narrator commenting on her sister's lurid tell-all, complete with blockquotes. The book was amusing, but as far as I can recall never laugh-out-loud funny. I found most of the larger-than-life characters unlikeable to the point of apathy -- even the narrator got on my bad side, and I have plenty of reasons to like her. Perhaps I was unduly influenced by blurbs talking up the ending, but I found it anticlimactic. A decent read and quite engaging, but I didn't ultimately get much out of it.
    • 3/5
      Read in one day. Hard to put down.
    • 2/5
      I found this book at a sale and got it just because of the title. It was ok, but just that. It's the story of twin sisters, one an aging virgin librarian and one the other extreme. The librarian tells the story. Her twin is accused of murder, and some bizarre friends of hers write her story, and her sister contemplates the book as she reads it, telling the story herself. It wasn't particularly funny, and I didn't really care about any of the characters either.
    • 1/5
      Best thing about this book is it's title.
    • 4/5
      After releasing the short story collection Jenny and the Jaws of Life in 1987, Willett didn't release another major work until 2005. But with a book this good, it turns out the wait was well worth it. Rhode Island is the remarkably unremarkable setting of this tale of twin sisters, Dorcas and Abigail, the first a dour and sardonic lover of the written word, the second a promiscuous small-town hussy, happily pursuing her own lascivious desires until she meets Conrad Lowe, former gynecologist and famous memorist. Lowe is also a sadistic, manipulative mysogynist, and his marriage to Abigail and intrusion into the world of both sisters sets the stage for a downward spiral of hideously hilarious proportions. Dorcas is an incredible narrator: her dry, near-detached bemusement lifts to reveal a woman deeply attached to her twin sister, despite all the differences between them, despite the near and realized tragedies of their circumstances. Willett also paints a vivid portrait of Rhode Island as the ultimate middle of nowhere, a place where natives neither flash their academia or revel in low-class pursuits, but where everyone attacks the grocery stores on the eve of an impending giant storm.
    • 5/5
      Best book ever. Really funny. About a book loving librarian and her sister!! biblioholic29 do you hear me? Nice and tweaked very wrong very satisfying. So in touch with her disgust!
    • 3/5
      When I saw the title of this book, I instantly wanted to read it. Such chutzpah! It made me laugh out loud. Then I heard the author was strongly recommended by David Sedaris. And then I found out the book took place in Rhode Island. Well, that clinched it -- I ordered it right away.Sad to say, it did not live up to its promise. The writing was good enough -- well structured and literary. But where was the funny? Augusten Burroughs called this "The funniest novel I have read, possibly ever." I can only conclude that Burroughs was either completely high when he read this, or else he never read the book at all. This book was miserable. Every single character was warped and despicable, and nothing but bad things happened to them. I also found it almost violently misogynistic... I almost couldn't finish this book. Honestly, it made me feel dirty.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book immensely. Jincy Willett uses her form to interject her thoughts on writing, women, and the mythological characteristics of every day life, while repeatedly making me laugh out loud. Very, very hard. I suspect men might appreciate this book less, because the narrator is a woman who has no use for men, and the only men in the novel are pompous and even evil. However, one of the things I've appreciated about Jincy Willett since *Jenny and the Jaws of Life* is the way her humor is sharp and direct. It does not have any sense of damage or desperation behind its wit, as one so often finds in women's humor. I found her book inspiring, and totally absorbing.
    • 3/5
      An amusing novel. A fairly stereotypical portrayal of an uptight librarian is annoying. And post-Katrina, the hurricane references might not be as amusing. I liked it at the time well enough.

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