Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Film rights have already been sold it will make a good movie.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Ripley and to the work of Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson.Ī vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few head-scratchers, including the evil-lesbian trope. Mangan’s debut pays homage to The Talented Mr. She makes a friend, a shady local named Joseph, and immediately begins lying to him, introducing herself as Alice Shipley. And while Alice is so frightened of Tangier that she can’t leave the house, Lucy feels right at home: she finds the maze of souks electrifying, and she quickly learns to enjoy the local custom of drinking scalding hot mint tea in the heat. Or at least Lucy says she is-from the start, there are inconsistencies in her story that put Alice in doubt. The two young women bonded quickly at Bennington: though Alice is a wealthy, delicate Brit and Lucy a rough-edged local on scholarship, both are orphans. In chapters that alternate between the two women’s points of view, the past and the present unfold. What is clear is that Lucy is romantically obsessed with Alice and that Alice is afraid of her. “I had never, not once in the many moments that had occurred between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the dusty alleyways of Morocco, expected to see her again.” Alice and Lucy did not part on good terms there are repeated references to a horrible accident which will remain mysterious for some time. Then Lucy Mason, her one-time best friend and roommate at Bennington College, shows up unannounced on her doorstep. He vanishes every day into the city, which he adores, while Alice is afraid to go out at all, having once gotten lost in the flea market. “At first, I had told myself that Tangier wouldn’t be so terrible,” says Alice Shipley, a young wife dragged there by her unpleasant husband, John McAllister, who has married her for her money. In 1956, a pair of college roommates meets again in Tangier, with terrifying results.
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