With a grip that kills
Lesley Glaister
IN THE CUT by Susanna Moore Picador, f12.99, pp. 180 Bret Easton Ellis told Susanna Moore that In the Cut was the most shocking thing he had ever read and ... yes, well ... I have to agree. But before I was shocked I was beguiled.
The main character is a thirty-some- thing teacher of creative writing. She's bright, independent, likeable; she's pas- sionate about language, life, friendship, sex. There's a real sense that her life extends beyond the pages of the book. One of the most agreeable aspects of the novel is this character's way of looking at life as a collection of fragments. She quotes from the poems on the subway they gradually seem to take on a personal- ly menacing meaning for her. She's engaged in the compilation of a dictionary of New York street slang and the text is punctuated at several points with fascinat- ing and sinister word-lists full of colloqui- alisms for killing and fucking and genitalia — the main areas of concern in the book. The narrator is also a collector of subway eavesdroppings, my favourite `that man, he's a trisexual'. Though the novel is slim and moves along at a tremendous page-fumbling pace, there is still room for interesting divergences; ponderings, for instance, about the role of coincidence in life; the impossibility of grading creative writing; the power of the male orgasm.
The plot is dark and grows swiftly dark- er. Women in our protagonist's neigh- bourhood are being murdered and disarticulated (a word she enjoys) — and she seems surrounded by likely homicidal candidates — an obsessed student writing an assignment in which he impersonates the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, for instance, and a creepy, mentally unsta- ble friend who hangs around outside her apartment taking note of her movements. During the murder investigation she embarks on a passionate sexual relation- ship with the officer in charge, who, she has reason to believe, might himself be involved in some way. It is passionately, startlingly portrayed sex. Pornographic? I don't know. Moore has herself described the book as 'a little bit porno'. But it's graphic certainly and erotic enough for me to feel furtive reading it on the train.
The novel explores the connections between danger and lust, barely pausing to consider love. The deeper the danger the greater the lust and the deeper the danger and so on, until the tension becomes almost unbearable. The world that the narrator inhabits is bleak, sordid, dangerous — and coming to get her. The worrying thing about this heroine is her lack of fear. She won't give up walk- ing alone on the streets. She flaunts her sexuality in an encounter by a window, knowing she's being watched — and by whom? She doesn't just ignore, she almost invites the danger: exciting maybe, but more foolhardy than truly brave.
That the narrator is such a likeable character, and that she's in mortal danger, draws the threads of suspense very tight indeed. That it's a first person narra- tion is a comfort. If she's telling the story, she must be all right in the end, mustn't she? Well, I'm not giving anything away but Moore has a narrative trick up her sleeve that made me feel, in the end, distinctly cheated. The denouement is nasty and sickening, too strong for me. But this is a thriller that really thrills, a gripping read, deeply sexy, deeply shocking and unfathomably disturbing.
'George, you're looking very sheepish'
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