The Deceptions

April 1, 2022

An executive editor and vice president at Norton, a poet honored by the Poetry Society of America, and a New York Times best-selling memoirist (History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life), Bialosky is also an accomplished novelist (The Prize). Her protagonist here, an empty nester who teaches Greek mythology at an elite boys' high school in New York, tries to relocate the meaning of her life and her weakening marriage as she strolls the Greek and Roman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, anxiously anticipating the forthcoming publication of her debut poetry collection.

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July 1, 2022
A middle-aged Manhattanite uses ancient art as a respite from her tumultuous personal and professional life. The narrator of Bialosky's latest novel tells us on the opening page: "Something terrible has happened and I don't know what to do." The "something" is revealed only gradually, but there are many things in the woman's life going wrong: her son's flailing first year at a fancy liberal arts college in Maine, the passionless marriage she endures, a career as a teacher and poet that has always seemed to hover on the brink of Major Literary Figure without ever quite getting there. The only people who ever seem to truly understand her plight are her neighbor's daughter, an intellectual girl who turns to the narrator for mentorship, and the Visiting Poet, a man who has recently blown through the narrator's life, leaving her reeling in the aftermath. To cope, she obsessively visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, turning to ancient art and its myths, finding solace even in the face of unthinkable betrayals. Bialosky's premise here--that female artists are subjected to artistic, emotional, psychological, and physical ravages that have prevented their full blooming--is admirable; one feels that Bialosky, the author of five collections of poetry as well as a memoir about poetry, among other works, is speaking at least partly for herself. But the novel goes lightly over scenes that have dramatic potential, such as the narrator's son being assaulted at school, and pours a great deal of energy into detailed recountings of the Met's holdings, complete with photos. The result reads more like a guidebook written by an earnest docent than the page-turning suspense novel, or even the meditative volume of lyric poems, it might have been. A well-intentioned but didactic paean to the life of the imagination.

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July 18, 2022
Bialosky (The Prize) contests patriarchal notions about life, marriage, and art in her clever if uneven latest. An unnamed poet and teacher regularly visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her refuge and source of inspiration. Through the lens of Greek and Roman mythology, she traces the gradual unraveling of her marriage after her son leaves for college in Maine, as well as her complicated friendship with a man she calls the “Visiting Poet,” who arrives from Ohio for a yearlong fellowship at her school. The narrator draws parallels between her life and the tribulations of Heracles and Odysseus (“What labors must I endure for what I’ve done?” she asks herself, looking at a bust of Heracles), and the explosive third act considers the myth of Leda and the Swan, prompting deeper questions on the autonomy of female desire in the face of male dominance (“Who is the true abductor, the victim or the perpetrator?”). It also inspires her next book. Despite the shocking betrayal-fueled climax, Bialosky’s messages on feminism are a bit pat—as one character says, “we have not come further as a society” since Mary Wollstonecraft’s “intellectual equals” declaration of 1792. Still, Bialosky’s sensuous evocation of longing and regret will no doubt linger in readers’ minds. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Sept.).

August 1, 2022
A poet and English teacher in an elite Manhattan boy's academy is gripped by remorse and anxious about the pending release of her new collection, provocatively titled The Rape of the Swan. She hasn't spoken much about the book with her medical researcher husband; their son has left for college, and his absence isn't bringing them any closer. Novelist and poet Bialosky sensitively and unnervingly tracks the forces that can undermine a marriage, including the miasma of misogyny. The poet is resented and disdained by her male colleagues and dreads dismissive treatment by a prominent male critic---maddening realities brought to a crescendo in her disastrous involvement with the overbearing and shockingly deceptive Visiting Poet. With the violent myth of Leda and Zeus, who takes the form of a swan to commit rape, as a harrowing template for this classics-steeped, intricately constructed drama, Bialosky has her increasingly distraught narrator seek daily refuge in the halls of ancient Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art at the Metropolitan Museum. Photographs of artworks add dimension and wonder to this stunning tale of entitlement, betrayal, creativity, and true power.

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