Review by New York Times Review
"I CAN'T BELIEVE she did a cartwheel," Lily Hayes's mother laments almost half-way through Jennifer DuBois's psychologically astute second novel, which takes not only its title but its controlling metaphor from this gymnastic feat. The cartwheel in question - performed during an interrogation in a Buenos Aires police station - is so amazingly tone-deaf it ends up casting Lily as the killer of her beautiful American roommate, Katy Kellers, stabbed to death while Lily was navelgazing in the night without a solid alibi. Readers will immediately recognize the outlines of the Amanda Knox story here. Knox is, of course, the American arrested in the 2007 murder of her fellow study-abroad student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy; her circuslike case has stretched on for six years, straining international relations and selling millions of tabloids, largely because both women were young, pretty and sexually active. And though Knox has tried to explain things in her own words (recently with TV appearances and the memoir "Waiting to Be Heard"), it remains unclear why she behaved so strangely after her arrest: not asking for a lawyer, publicly kissing her Italian boyfriend at the murder scene and, yes, doing yoga in view of investigators. Knox's yoga is Lily Hayes's cartwheel, and also DuBois's springboard. Yet while the parallels are many, they are not necessarily salient; the interests of "Cartwheel" are overwhelmingly literary. Events in the novel are not recounted as newsworthy in themselves, best delivered untouched; rather, DuBois wrings them for that which is universally (or at least culturally) meaningful. She uses the given story, in other words, as a thematic test case: How could a well-intentioned girl - a girl like your daughter or mine - end up looking so guilty of murder, leading millions to believe the charges? How does our American blitheness, the growing sexual confidence of (some of) our young women, the openness of speech and behavior, operate out of context? When is naïveté a kind of crime? And how is a parent implicated by a child who commits such a crime? Many readers of "Cartwheel" might recognize their own (or their children's) oafish student-abroad comportment in Lily, or cringe to imagine what their present-day intimates would have thought of them decades earlier, shirtless and chanting in the Plaza Mayor, say, or wading in the Trevi Fountain. What softens the blow "Cartwheel" delivers on this score is its humor; the novel is often dangerously funny. Take the character of Andrew Hayes, the beleaguered father who flies to Buenos Aires in the opening pages to try to help his daughter. Although he is a good father - thoughtful, trustworthy - DuBois gives him a mercilessly cleareyed view of his daughter, and lets him be irritated at the mess she's made. He considers Lily: "Average, more or less - bright, of course, and curious, and a bit reckless, and possessed of an annoying tendency to try to bring philosophy to bear on daily life in rather purist and militant ways - but all that this added up to, essentially, was average for a decent young student at a decent New England college" (in Lily's case, Middlebury). He regrets that he and his ex-wife didn't teach Lily how to "batten down" her large breasts, which she barely clothes, but which in the sudden media glare contribute to "a sloppy sort of prettiness, suggesting carelessness, sensuality, unearned privilege." Lily herself, when we get to her, has her own barbs for her family and its milieu. She considers her parents depressives who "hated life" but remained "very polite to it." Lily understands that their depression stems from the death of a beloved infant daughter, Janie, their first-born. But she tramples even on this sacred memory, tired of the space the baby and her loss have consumed. More generally, she is tired of the constant obligatory footnoting of her privilege, a tendency her liberal parents model in their inability to get really mad about anything, including Lily's incarceration. Even Andrew checks his anger over life's blows, thinking, "It was all . . . a little much for one lifetime - though he had to weigh it against his socioeconomic privilege, health, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality, American citizenship, etc., etc." DuBois is spot-on in making Lily a composite of many young women who might arrive at a place like Middlebury at this point in time, simultaneously irritating and extraordinarily interesting - messy, free, vital and full of her own hypereducated misinterpretations. Her downfall in "Cartwheel" does not suggest a young woman's failed attempt at sexual liberation so much as it does an intellectual's failed attempt to be carefree. The writing, fused as it is with the characters' points of view, shares in their lightly lampooning observations, as when Lily remembers her "articulate, bespectacled women's studies classmates" back in Vermont, "doomed to eternally debate gender versus equity feminism." As seen here and in her smart debut novel, "A Partial History of Lost Causes," inner monologue is DuBois's keenest interest, and she is especially skilled at channeling the brain waves of these convincing overthinkers. This includes the characterization of Sebastien LeCompte, the wealthy, American-educated boy who lives next door to Lily and Katy's Argentine host family. Attractive like "a homo-sexual pirate" and cloaked in excessive, impermeable irony, Sebastien gets mixed up with Lily, and thereby the murder case, when all he really wants is to be left alone to grieve his parents, killed in a suspicious plane crash some years before. Outside the house after an awkward dinner party with the American girls, Sebastien apologizes to Katy: "I am almost wholly unsocialized." But Katy, smarter than she looks, observes, "You are socialized half out of your mind." LESS CONVINCING IS the character of Eduardo Campos, the Argentine prosecutor in the case. He is portrayed as a repressed man prosecuting Lily with an almost absurd level of self-deception, his essential motive being to work out his anger at his inconstant wife. Only here does the knowledge of a character's interior feel hazy to the author, who generally refuses to offer the reader facile interpretive ways out. Neither does Campos, nor any aspect of the novel, feel particularly Argentine. Though the plot of a helpless American abroad has the potential for Paul Bowlesian horror, DuBois sticks to descriptions of generic public transportation and an array of descriptions of light, which is inherently placeles s (here it is "rubescent," there it is "vermiculated"), almost as if the author, evoking some of her more culturally aware characters, fears exploiting Argentina by using it as a backdrop. As it turns out, there are a number of schools of thought dedicated to the Amanda Knox case. One says her demonization in the media was intimately connected with the political theater of Berlusconi's Italy, and so forth. All that is interesting, but in the end, the case is really just a shame. One promising young woman is dead; another is lost. DuBois hits that larger sadness just right and dispenses with all the salacious details you can readily find elsewhere. In fact, I would have liked to see her part ways with her seed story even more. Why follow the exact machinations of the given legal case (false accusation of a bar owner, DNA on a bra clasp) when something yet more fictionally explosive was easily in the reach of a writer as talented as DuBois? And talented she is. The writing in "Cartwheel" is a pleasure - electric, finetuned, intelligent, conflicted. The novel is engrossing, and its portraiture hits delightfully and necessarily close to home. AMITY GAIGE is the author, most recently, of the novel "Schroder."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 13, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lily Hayes, 21, is a study-abroad student in Buenos Aires. Her life seems fairly unexceptional until her roommate, Katy, is brutally murdered, and Lily, charged with the crime, is remanded to prison pending her trial. But is she guilty, and who is Lily, really? To find answers to these questions, the novel is told from multiple points of view not only that of Lily but also that of her family; of sardonic Sebastien, the boy with whom she has been having an affair; and of the prosecutor in the case. In the process, it raises even more questions. What possible motive could Lily have had? Why, left momentarily alone after her first interrogation, did she turn a cartwheel? And has she, as her sister asserts, always been weird? In her skillful examination of these matters, the author does an excellent job of creating and maintaining a pervasive feeling of foreboding and suspense. Sometimes bleak, duBois' ambitious second novel is an acute psychological study of character that rises to the level of the philosophical, specifically the existential. In this it may not be for every reader, but fans of character-driven literary fiction will welcome its challenges. Though inspired by the Amanda Knox case, Cartwheel is very much its own individual work of the author's creative imagination.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Taking themes that were "loosely inspired by the story of Amanda Knox," Cartwheel follows American exchange student Lily Hayes, who has been accused of murdering her roommate, Katy Kellers, in Argentina. Like Knox, Lily's troublesome lack of anguish, as reportedly evidenced by canoodling with her boyfriend the day after the murder, causes an uproar in the media. Like Knox, Lily seems to have been completely normal-so normal, in fact, that her disbelief at her predicament leads to some bad choices. While duBois (A Partial History of Lost Causes) clearly has the authorial chops to illustrate complex characters, Cartwheel remains flat partly because she seems more focused on avoiding right answers or easy sympathy than creating characters who are more than moral specimens. While muddying the waters of right and wrong is almost always a valiant cause in literature, this novel reads more like an intellectual exercise in examining all the different angles rather than an emotional engagement with human beings. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (Oct. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In a novel loosely based on the Amanda Knox case, duBois (A Partial History of Lost Causes) tells the story of Lily Hayes, a young exchange student in Argentina whose roommate, Katy, has been murdered. Lily is immediately arrested and is the prime suspect, partially because of her behavior after the arrest, including doing a cartwheel during interrogation. The story is told from various points of view: from that of the prosecutor; Lily's father; Sebastian, a loner whose wealthy parents died under mysterious circumstances; and Lily herself. The work concludes with Lily's trial. Reader Emily Rankin narrates professionally and smoothly. VERDICT Recommended for fans of literary fiction and psychological suspense. ["While her book is cleverly written, duBois never builds any sympathy for her characters, taking a detached clinical view rather than engaging the emotions," read the review of the Random hc, LJ 9/15/13.]-Mary Knapp, Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young, white American woman studying overseas is accused of murdering her roommate. She is seen through different prisms in this second novel from duBois (A Partial History of Lost Causes, 2012). According to the author, "the themes of this book were loosely inspired by the story of Amanda Knox." The first link is the title, which appropriates Amanda's notorious cartwheel while in police custody in Italy. The cartwheeler here is 20-year-old Lily Hayes. She has come to Buenos Aires, ostensibly, to further her studies. Her roommate is bland, beautiful Katy Kellers from Los Angeles. Their neighbor, who lives by himself in a decaying mansion, is the ridiculously rich American Sebastien LeCompte. The young, lonely, epicene Sebastien, who hides his true self under layers of affectation, belongs in Capote country. He would seem an improbable boyfriend for either of the women, yet he and Lily begin a relationship, with Lily calling the shots. The horror comes one night when Lily finds Katy stabbed to death. The state investigator, Eduardo Campos, is convinced of Lily's guilt. The novel begins with Lily's professor father, Andrew, visiting her in a holding cell. It cycles through four viewpoints (Andrew, Lily, Sebastien, Eduardo) and moves between the buildup to the murder and its aftermath. The author may have been hoping to combine a crime novel with a novel of character. Neither one works. The awkward construction means suspense is minimal. Attempts to cannibalize Amanda's story, such as Lily's fingering of her black boss at the club where she worked weekends, fall flat. Lily herself is a not very interesting addition to those thousands of young Americans looking to spread their wings in an exotic locale. Readers are meant to presume her innocence while retaining a tiny sliver of doubt, reinforced by that ballyhooed, albeit irrelevant, cartwheel. So what really went down? The dubious confession of the killer is the only clue. A tangled tale that leaves protagonist Lily, and the crime, unilluminated.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
