In a phone call with her brother, Maeve admits, “I need to be distracted.”
Enter Harrison Riddles, a best-selling novelist, who’s called the library, asking for her. Riddles is Maeve’s favorite writer. She’s read all his books and finds him “warmer than Roth, cooler than Irving, easier than Pynchon” — and better-looking than all three. Maeve has written the author many fan letters, with no response. Now he’d like to do an event at the library.
It turns out Riddles also wants to write a novel based on the life of Maeve’s friend Willie, a refugee from Sudan. In exchange for Willie’s trauma, the author will pay him half of the book’s (sizable) advance, plus most of the royalties. “Money is the ultimate respect,” he informs Willie.
Willie agrees to this arrangement, and Maeve is enlisted to assist. She becomes something of a Véra to Riddles’s Vladimir, all but licking his postage stamps: She brings groceries and takeout and listens to Riddles fret about point of view. He wants to write Willie’s story in the first person, which makes Willie feel weird. But Riddles might do it anyway; as he tells Maeve, “I’m at the mercy of the voice.”
Feeling useful, even wanted, Maeve confides in him about Libby, that she’d found herself wondering about the girl in the stall. “Imagination is never against the law,” Riddles says. Maybe so, but one wishes he’d read Toni Morrison on whiteness: “The subject of the dream is the dreamer.” In lambasting Riddles’s approach to storytelling, Braunstein fashions a red-hot poker that skewers the limits of the white imagination.
Maeve tries to desensitize herself to Riddles in the same way she tried to dispel Libby’s power over her: through exposure therapy. “You can teach the irrational signals to behave,” she thinks. But Braunstein’s sharp-witted, ravishing novel shows how insensitivity can be an aphrodisiac: When Maeve stares at rows and rows of pictures of the author, she only gets more turned on.
