Whitney Otto is a novelist whose work dares to take literary chances while remaining completely accessible - witness the enormously popular and critical success of How to Make an American Quilt, praised by the Los Angeles Times as 'highly original...fascinating...a spectrum of women's experiences in the 20th century.' After her auspicious debut, Otto returns with Now You See Her, a remarkably affecting tale of a woman as she approaches forty. In the weeks prior to her birthday, Kiki Shaw discovers that she is 'disappearing': the cat walks through her foot; her co-workers write her notes as she sits inches away from them at her desk; her mirror image is growing increasingly unpredictable. This leaves Kiki wondering if inexplicable occurrences and a general unpredictability are the hallmarks of middle age, and, if so, how she will make sense of it all. It becomes clear that this 'fade-out' is literal as well as metaphorical. Kiki spends her days working as a fact-finder/categorizer for a TV game show - a suitable profession for a woman who has always been drawn to trivia, lists, and categories as a way of ordering her life. It is often while at her desk that she tries to examine her odd life, only to find herself side-tracked by the stories of her girlfriends and her mother. As the 'categories' provide the structure for Otto's novel, so do they allow the stance of the other characters to unfold. The irony of it all is that while Kiki pales, the inner lives of her mother, her close female friends, even the wife of the lover of one of them, become increasingly vivid. On the program she works for, Kiki has the answers, but she must ask the right questions if she wants to win back hersubstantiality. Playing with time and space, fact and fiction, illusion and reality - even the figures of Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse - Now You See Her keeps the reader enchantingly off-balance and entertained.
Title: Now You See Her
Sub Title:
Author: Whitney Otto
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Year: 1995
Number of pages: 303
ISBN: 9780345378262
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