Synopses & Reviews
“Every story is a love story.”–Nora Mars, Evil Love, (1962)
Nora Mars–glamour girl, star of stage and screen, B-movie goddess–has slowly aged out of mainstream popularity and quickly slipped into a coma. Known as much for her astonishing looks, her five husbands, and her way with words (“I’m all for love at first sight. It saves a lot of time”) as for her movie career, Nora Mars has been a tabloid’s dream diva.
Marie Brown, the heroine of Jenny McPhee’s debut novel The Center of Things, is everything that Nora is not: too tall, too plain, too unmarried, and always too early. But she also happens to be Nora’s number-one fan and knows enough to use the star’s untimely near-death to advance her own career at the Gotham City Star by insisting on writing her obit. Along the way she meets the charismatic Rex Mars, Nora Mars’s husband number-three, and struggles between reportorial integrity and plain old lust.
But Marie also has a secret life: She spends every free moment at the library, pursuing her fascination with physics. Here she meets the strange, intriguing Marco Trentadue, a “freelance intellectual” who bears a striking resemblance to Peter Lorre. While Marie is drawn more and more to Rex, she gradually finds Marco to be the stranger attractor.
Interweaving vignettes from Marie’s past, movie lore and lines, and metaphorical physics, Jenny McPhee limns the randomness of everyday life, the conflicting pulls of libido and intellect, and the choices–conscious or not–that shape the search for true love.
Review
"McPhee...knows how to keep things light. All her cosmic vamping adds a teasing hint of intellectual relief to a tale of tangled lives that for all its complexity might seem a shade cartoonish told straight out....[W]e like this novel even when we think we know where it's going. We even buy the ending, a fairy-tale triumph so fantastical...that I dare not reveal it." Dennis Overbye, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"In this smart, fast-paced metaphysical thriller Jenny McPhee brings the insights of quantum mechanics to bear upon love, stardom, and the baffling uncertainties of human behavior. The Center of Things is a brilliant debut by a writer of exceptional talent and promise." Amitav Ghosh, author of The Glass Palace
Review
"A greatly intelligent work, entertaining, sometimes satirical, original, and inventive. Jenny McPhee is an unusually confident first novelist." Muriel Spark, author of Aiding and Abetting
Synopsis
In this captivating first novel by literary scion Jenny McPhee, the heroine is Marie Brown, the number one fan of aging movie star Nora Mars. When Nora slips into a coma, Marie meets the charismatic Rex Mars, husband number three, and feels the pulls of libido and intellect as she searches for true love.
About the Author
Jenny McPhee is the coauthor with her sisters Martha and Laura of Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits. She is the translator of Paolo Maurensig’s Canone Inverso and co-translator of Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II. Her short stories have been published in many literary reviews including Glimmer Train, Zoetrope, and Brooklyn Review. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum.
From the Hardcover edition.