This is what we'd get if Jane Austen were writing in 21st century America--a book that expands the possibilities of the national novel and of the female protagonist. Tillman brings into being a microcosm of American democracy, a scholarly colony functioning like Melville's Pequod, in which competing values--rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor--compete with one another through a hilarious narrative, cycling through skin disease, chair design, Manifest Destiny--folded into the narrator's memories and emotional life, culminating, in Wagnerian fashion, in a supernatural event, offering escape, transcendence, or perhaps nothing…

Lynne Tillman, Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She has collaborated often with artists and writes regularly on art and culture.

Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). Absence Makes the Heart (1990) is her first collection of short stories; The Broad Picture (1997) is a collection of Tillman's essays which were published in literary and art magazines and journals. In 1995, Tillman's The Velvet Years: Warhol's Factory 1965-1967 was published with photographs by Stephen Shore; it presented narratives from Factory habituees as well as her critical introductory essay on Warhol, his art, and studio. Tillman is also the author of the nonfiction book The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. (1999), a cultural and social history of a literary landmark, where writers and artists congregated for nearly 20 years. She has taught at Princeton and Bard College. Tillman is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine.

Sometimes in the morning the cook is in a talkative mood, and her smile and her moderately stained teeth both disquiet and cheer me, so I might stay a while in her kitchen, its odors reminiscent of other times, many of which were probably unhappy, but whose smells are still redolent, the ordinary aromas saturate remote, yet vivid lost events bittersweetly. I wait for her to describe her life, but she is usually circumspect, having worked many years for other people, and probably she knows it's often better not to say anything, especially statements that admit to or betray dissatisfaction, that risk exposing her to censure, ridicule, or disrepute, especially comments that reek of bitterness, like a fart, though some might anyway nurse their foulness and be profligate with their bitter complaints. But an enemy's bitterness is never foul, an enemy's complaints are revelatory.

Inadvertently, I've marched into enemy territory, unprotected on a street, encountering persons I hate who hate me, but I fought the instinct to run into a doorway or collapse onto the sidewalk, to pretend I was faint or about to vomit, and kept walking, as if I were fearless, which I'm not. Once, I strode past two treacherous dissemblers and waved, pretending there wasn't a great, mysterious enmity--enduring hatred runs like water, elusive in its origins, as Chekhov shows, more mysterious than its opposite, since in love we love ourselves, while a hater's chiasmatic relationship to the despised one and to herself or himself is not precisely self-hatred and more difficult to plumb. Between the dissemblers and myself, there grew a steep, eternal divide, which has a kind of magnificence, specifically, its venerability, and which, if we could have, if it were appropriate, if we lived in a different place among different people, we might fight about, physically, or go to war to settle, though it wouldn't ever be settled.

Sometimes there is nothing to do other than resist or fight, but some people are locked inside their own wreckage and can't do either. Sometimes an individual must fight or flee, if able and not already irrevocably ruined or paralyzed by a past that can't be recovered, because there is no other possibility to survive than to fight, in some way, for what's needed or wanted, though some people would never fight or don't ever feel personally threatened, but when they do, when an ominous threat occurs, they might take up arms in some sense. And in some, these fears or emotions might be considered skin deep, for which they could find treatment. But skin lets us know that a surface often isn't superficial. Dermatologic diseases recognize no national or hemispheric boundaries, doctors confront a global dermatology, since an exotic disease might appear in the Congo and Los Angeles. There are resurgences, of syphilis, for one, and a peculiar diagnostic sign of unilateral congenital syphilis--called Higoumenakis' sign, discovered by its eponymous Greek doctor--is a raised or protruding collarbone. Serologic tests for syphilis can reveal an individual's immunologic condition, but not whether he or she is currently infected. Other conditions that indicate congenital syphilis are the saddle nose and Hutchinson's teeth, or peg-shaped upper incisors that are centrally notched. These teeth never occur outside of congenital syphilis. It was a Dr. Hutchinson who also noted opacities of the cornea and eighth nerve deafness that, together with the teeth, form the diagnostic Hutchinson triad. Less dramatic skin eruptions can become violently infected--around a cuticle, say, but there is no stigma attached to it, unless it goes untreated. A bad tooth, untreated, its infection appearing first as an inflamed gum, might descend farther under the gum into the jaw and ultimately infect the brain and cause death. Many people died of tooth decay before the 20th century particularly and still do. Skin is not what it appears to an untrained eye, and for this I appreciate my dermatologist who carries within him, after much training and research, an ability to read texts I can't. Skin is a parchment for the body. He can spot something inimical to me when I can't and what appears benign may also be harmless for a time--but then a small spot on the cheek can grow into a murderous melanoma.

The intransigent enemy is often a friend who wordlessly turns, embroidering insult upon insult and calumny upon calumny within himself or herself, while the other is unaware of these rank occurrences, and so the former, though still-present friend, an incipient enemy, acts against the unknowing one, cannily, all the while pretending to friendship but causing damage and havoc, and only in retrospect, which is dumb wisdom, does the friend realize the existence of an enemy, whose enmity lasts a lifetime but which has come about slowly and stealthily in the darkly benign nights of supposed friendship. I have had several episodes in which I wandered, without presence of mind, into enemy territory, imagining I was among friends, and sometimes it was I who may have provoked or caused the rift, without knowing I did, and sometimes whoever I am or was was not the cause of the hatred, since its origin belonged within the friend, to whom I, the other, am nothing more than a suitable object. One such friend, someone I liked but didn�t know long, to whom I was indifferent for a period of time, unaware of her growing anguish in a time of my own trouble, disappeared, not only from my view but from others�, and when I searched for her, but could not locate her, but then finally did, she would have nothing to do with me. I expect I am an enemy of hers now, while she will always be someone I like whom I may have hurt inadvertently, and those are the saddest enemies to have. Although, since I didn�t know her well, she may be a shallow, thick-skinned, insensitive character, an opportunist or someone so damaged as to be incapable of love and compassion. The saddest enemy is her kind, and I don�t want to dwell on it, so I never mention her, because for one thing she was never vital to my life, and also it�s usually better not to say anything, especially about subjects plagued by illegibility.

When I first arrived here, in a voluntary manner but wearily, as I had little hope, a woman inquired in the main hall, right upon meeting me, at what hour did I regularly awaken, and I felt alarm. I didn�t understand why she needed to know, of what moment my rising was to her, but she explained she was only curious. I wasn�t curious about when she awakened, though I have curiosity about many things, so I thought, quickly, my stomach slightly upset, as I have a nervous stomach, since the stomach is a second heart I was told by a Greek therapeutic cosmetician, there might be a problem. She might be a potential enemy to my sleep or even to my being, though this seemed farfetched, but it would be a miracle to arrive somewhere and find no problem or obstacle. It would have been a miracle if the girl in the camp infirmary, who was not allowed medicine to cure her, because of her parents� religion, grew up and lived a blissful life. When I was nearly six, walking past the infirmary on the way to the cafeteria, I wanted to visit her, to go to her bedside and comfort her, or at least see her, though I was afraid I might become sick and die as soon as I entered the infirmary. I feared also that I might encounter her religious parents who were depriving her of medicine, maybe even killing her. She might have survived the summer, and, if she did, people could say it was a miracle, God�s work, and be thankful, though by now she might know how close she came to dying and blame her parents for endangering her welfare, and have nothing to do with the stern people who gave her life and then played dice with it. Or, she might believe in miracles and love her parents and the religion into which was born about which she had no choice, no one has a choice about the most crucial things in life, though maybe she doesn�t object to her fate.