The Whiteness of Bones

by Susanna Moore

Overview

In her ravishing and moving second novel, the bestselling author of In the Cut tells the story of Mamie Clarke, who sets out to lose herself in New York City.

Having only previously known the fragile, magical world of her childhood on the lush Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, Mamie leaves college to visit her sophisticated aunt in New York. With her beautiful and self-destructive younger sister Claire in tow, Mamie must learn to make her way in a world of money, power, sex, and drugs. Moore’s sharp and witty book captures an unforgettable time and place—the Manhattan of the early 80s— and the powerful feelings engendered there.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400075041
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/16/2003
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	First Vintage Contemporaries Edition
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	684,663
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Susanna Moore is from Hawaii but now lives in New York City. She is the author of the novels In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, will be published by the National Geographic Society in 2003.

Editorial Reviews

An utterly wonderful novel. . .I envy everyone who enter, for the first time, its world.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

"A remarkably sly balancing act: a deeply sensual, richly imagined coming-of-age story that manages to use a wickedly satiric portrait of the uppercrust in the Manhattan of the early 1980s." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"An alluring novel, sure in its embrace of the reader. . .who is swep away by Moore's eye for detail."—Newsday

"Ms. Moore possesses a finely tuned radar system for phoniness and pretension, and many of her cameo portraits glitter with a Waugh-like black humor. Indeed, she demonstrates in this novel that she not only has a gift for delineating the tragedies of domestic life...but that she also has a capacity for comic invention, for showing what happens when our vanities run amok."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"An engrossing, sensual novel whose characters seem to live from the moment of their introduction and whose plot is both believable and satisfying. In short, The Whiteness of Bones is the kind of book you'll read, re-read, and remember."—West Coast Review of Books

“So evocative you can almost feel the mud between your toes. . . . Moore makes her story as real and mysterious as any island legend, as powerful as the scent of the white ginger flowers.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Moore’s controlled prose maintains her ambitiously serious intent. As much as women love Colette’s and Virginia Woolf’s portraits of adored mothers and their daughters, many will identify more with this wounded pair.” –Ms.

“Spare but lyrical. . . . An engrossing novel, profoundly disturbing in its message of feminine guilt.” –Publishers Weekly

“A remarkably sly balancing act: a deeply sensual, richly imagined coming-of-age story that manages to use a wickedly satiric portrait of the uppercrust in the Manhattan of the early 1980s.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

“An engrossing, sensual novel whose characters seem to live from the moment of their introduction and whose plot is both believable and satisfying. In short, The Whiteness of Bones is the kind of book you’ll read, re-read, and remember.” –West Coast Review of Books

From the Publisher

Returning to the Hawaiian setting of her highly praised first novel, My Old Sweetheart , Moore here evokes also the fashionably decadent milieu of the idle rich in 1980s Manhattan. Mamie Clarke grows up on the island of Kauai, desperately seeking the attention of her remote, ``benignly distracted'' mother. When she is 12, Mamie is sexually fondled by a trusted servant, a traumatizing event for which she feels she is to blame, and which leads her to despise her body and her femininity. Socially inexperienced and naive, at 21 she goes to New York to live with her scatty Aunt Alysse, one of a group of free-spending, indolent, vacuous, boozy and much-married womenall of them out to snare yet another man. Mamie is able to resist Alysse's meretricious values, but her younger sister Claire, who has reacted to their upbringing by becoming as irresponsible as Mamie is preternaturally guilty and responsible, eagerly enters into Alysse's sophisticated circle, where she falls prey to the drug culture. While Moore's spare but lyrical prose is compellingespecially when she describes the rhythms of island lifeher psychological portrait of Mamie eventually takes on an overwrought and rather hysterical tinge. Nonetheless, this is an engrossing novel, profoundly disturbing in its message of feminine guilt, yet satisfying in Mamie's eventual recognition of how to ``purify'' her soul. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this coming-of-age novel by the author of My Old Sweetheart ( LJ 10/15/82), 20-year-old Mamie Clarke moves from Maui to New York, hoping to exorcize childhood ghosts that have left her emotionally numb. She achieves peace after a series of alternately amusing and sordid adventures with assorted urban cosmopolites. Unfortunately, few of the potentially interesting characters are fully realized; Moore's justly praised spare prose style here serves her ill as the dry vocalizations of an omniscient narrator. Repeatedly, the reader is told about rather than shown the characters' inner lives. When Mamie and her companions do speak for themselves, they command attention, as do vivid descriptions of Hawaii, but these moments are all too few. Not an essential purchase. Starr E. Smith, Georgetown Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.

Library Journal

Ms. Moore possesses a finely tuned radar system for phoniness and pretension, and many of her cameo portraits glitter with a Waugh-like humor. Indeed, she demonstrates in this novel that she not only has a gift for deliniating the tragedies of domestic life -- our loss of innocence, our discovery of the disparity between the public and private selves -- but she also has the capacity for comic invention, for showing what happens when our vanities run amok. -- The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani