ESTATE

A woman works through the tangle of her life in this impressionistic follow-up to Inverno (2024).

“I had begun writing a long letter, a letter to a man with whom I was in love…” begins Caroline, the narrator of Zarin’s second brief novel. She’s middle-aged, lives in New York, is estranged from her husband, Frank, and is the mother of three children—George, Louie, and Pom. She’s writing to Lorenzo, an Italian man with whom she’s having an extended affair, who is himself a paramour to two other women. Caroline’s letter is the work of several months and not something she ever intends to send; rather, it is a way to parse her own feelings and uncover how she became “the person who might write such a letter, and behave in such a way, behavior of which I deeply disapprove.” In the pages that follow, she explores not only the highs and lows of her current romance, but a previous one with a man named Alastair (the focus of Inverno), a friendship with a man named Daniel who struggled with bipolar disorder, and her preoccupation with the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller in New Guinea in 1961. As readers wade into Caroline’s stream of consciousness, they are treated to stunningly precise bits of prose (“I am thinking that one day I will learn to live without the sound that you make in the back of your throat, that difficult h. A small thing”), but it is often hard to find one’s footing. The novel is thick with allusions and quotations—William Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Leonard Cohen, Greek myth—some with more sign-posting than others. Readers with considerable familiarity with the Western canon may find this literary sleuthing rewarding, while others may find the bar to entry frustratingly high.

A dense, dizzying exploration of desire and the mystery of the self.