I really wish that books came with little warnings for the unassuming reader: things like, "Mom with cancer!" or "Descriptive rape scene!" or "Don't believe a word of the praise printed on the back cover!" Not that I believe in censorship, I don't, and I don't really think marking up a book with all sorts warnings would be helpful, or even something I'd support. It's just sometimes, when I'm halfway through a seemingly good book and WHAM!, I'm surprised by an out-of-nowhere nauseating torture scene, I wish I'd had a little warning.

I had one of those moments during Winner of the National Book Award, Jincy Willett's first novel praised by Augusten Burroughs as "The funniest novel I have read...ever. Brilliant, totally original, and worthy of its title." Silly little me assumed I'd be in for a more light-hearted, amusing, witty story in the vein of Willet's other novel, The Writing Class. Well, WARNING! to you, dear reader: midway through, this book begins to feel a little more like a Lifetime movie (albiet a clever, witty movie) than the "funniest novel...ever."

This otherwise common story of rival twins with opposite but complementing personalities does have an uncommon narrative. Dorcas Mather is still the Great Librarian Stereotype: clever, smart, a forty-year-old virgin and a self-proclaimed spinster. Dorcas is forced to confront her sister's new memoir, In the Driver's Seat: The Abigal Mather Story, while working alone at the library. Her narrative follows the chapters in Abigal's story, which guides Dorcas's own story.

Like Willett's other novel, The Writing Class, Winner of the National Book Award starts off strong but ends weakly.

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. ( )

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! ( )

This was a dark story, but the writing was exquisite. I wasn't even offended the stereotypical cerebral librarian character because she was so explained so well. ( )

Fiction set in Rhode Island seems to feature people of disturbing disfunctionality. It's true of the writings of Spalding Grey. The same goes for Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone which would actually make good companion reading for this book. Then there's the film oeuvre of the Farrelly Brothers. There's something about our neighbors to the South. Then again John Irving and Stephen King are evidence that a twisted nature exists in northern New England as well.

Jincy Willet keeps the tradition alive with The Winner of the National Book Award which stradles the boundary between quirky and disturbing. And yes that is the title of the book. No, it did not receive the award but it does have the honor of being the William & Mary Alumni Boston Chapter book club selection for February.

Willet's novel is about twin sisters Dorcas and Abigail. Dorcas, who narrates the novel, is cynical, intellectual (although she claims not to be), cranky and disinterested in all things carnal. Her polar opposite Abigail is fleshy, lazy and lives for sensual pleasure. There are highly symbolic passages about their being two halves of a complete person, but I pass over those parts. The third character of this novel is the misogynist sociopath Conrad Lowe whom Abigail marries. Despite his abusive nature, Abigail submits to him, and despite being able to see right through him, Dorcas collaborates with him.

The novel begins with Dorcas going to her job at the library during a hurricane (I try not to grate my teeth that even this sassy, self-assured woman falls into the librarian stereotype of a celibate old maid). She cannot avoid picking up and reading the new tell-all, true crime, Lifetime Movie of the Week, autobiography written by Abigail to explain why she murdered Conrad. This basically serves as the framing device as each chapter begins with an excerpt from Abigail's book followed by extensive commentary from Dorcas of what really happened. Of course, which sister can really be trusted is central to the tension of the novel.

I shant go into the details of the novel, but as Dorcas narration of their life grows increasingly strange as it progresses. The story revolves around the growing triangle of hate among Dorcas, Abigail, and Conrad as well as amusing side characters such as the pretentious poet Guy and his useless wife Hilda (who co-writes Abigail's book). The novel is subtitled "A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather", the latter coming in both the hurricane in the framing story and in the climax of the novel which occurs during The Blizzard of '78 (which coincidentally began on February 6, the same day I completed reading this book).

The novel in the end turns out to be about sisterly love although one wouldn't expect it from the snarky tone in which the book begins. I give it good but not great marks. Definitely something I reccomend more highly to a New Englander than to anyone from another region.

Interesting Quotes:
Rhode Island natives, including those born overseas, are under ordinary circumstances so shy and mistrustful around people they don't know as to seem almost deranged. They never look as stranger in the eye, or if they do, they unfocus their own eyes. I don't mean a stranger you pass in the street, I mean a stranger who's lived next door to you for twenty-five years, or a stranger you ask directions from or hand his dropped wallet to or knock down with your car.

This probably has something to do with the tradition of overcrowding, of living cheek by jowl for two hundred years. Whatever the cause, we have no stage presence at all, no Southern theatrics, Midwestern irony, Western hyperbole, New York cynicism. We don't even have the famous and overrated Maine understatement. We have instead an Unfortunate Manner. (p. 5)
Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking. (p. 53)

That's one fine thing about Rhode Island, and most of New England, and New York, too. No, no New York. New Yorkers genuinely have no curiosity. They don't want to know. New Englanders do, but they'll be damned if they'll ask. ... No one ever asked what happened. They stared, but they didn't wink or smile, and they didn't ask.

Because (a) it was none of their business; and (b) they didn't want to give us the satisfaction.

C.S. Lewis never sold me on mere Christianity, be he did assure me that I wasn't neurotic. It was possible to live an imagined life, and to live it fully. To dwell within one's mind and, through books, the minds of others.

You escape, said Abe Marx, into your books. I didn't have the with then, quite, for the obvious riposte: I escape, when I feel the need, into what all you bullies insist is reality. I study birds, library patrons, local politicians. Sometimes I garden. Sometimes I watch the Sox. Sometimes I drink. I keep a neat house and I pay my taxes, all in the real world. But I don't live there.

Of course, Lewis was a scholar, and I am not. I do have a reputation, locally, as something of an intellectual, but this is wrong. I am simply an omnivorous reader, and like all good omnivores I take my pleasures where I find them. In my real life, my inner life, I am as great a sensualist as my sister. (p. 279)

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