It seems to me that Sergio de la Pava’s extraordinary novel, A Naked Singularity, was just that – a singularity. Here, with Lost Empress, I’m sure he set out with the best intentions to create something even more spectacular. But instead he ends up, in my view, with a misjudged and highly self-indulgent melee.
On the plus side, Lost Empress has some inventive characters, most notably Nina Gill, the striking-looking, shoot-from-the-ample-hip, win-at-all-costs heroine and the book is certainly a duller place when she’s not on the page. Nina has lost out to her brother Daniel in the inheritance stakes, he gaining ownership of their father’s NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys, she being left with the Indoor Football League’s booby-prize, Paterson Pork. Can she put the nondescript town of Paterson on the map?
There are also plenty of other elements that could potentially have held the reader’s interest. Unfortunately, de la Pava wrings the life out of them, indulging in endless rambling about astrophysics, the parables of the New Testament, the frustration of dealing with first response 911 calls, the injustice of incarceration, Salvador Dalí, Joni Mitchell and the esoterica of American football. (Well, I suppose this last is to be expected given the plot. There is a rundown of the rules at the end of the book.)
I found myself skipping more and more of Lost Empress until towards the end when de la Pava returns to the main thrust of his narrative and starts to pull the threads together. Occasionally, we catch a brief (I use the term loosely; de la Pava does not do brief) glimpse of the man who wrote A Naked Singularity. It’s not that we want our favoured authors to keep repeating that which we loved – but on the other hand, we don’t want them to bore us into skipping vast chunks, do we?
This quote seems apt: "...we see Jesus as a kind of free literary artist constantly presenting and shaping his truth through stories, metaphor, symbolism. I'm reminded of my high school English class and a time when we spent about a week analysing a poem, don't quite remember which one. Finally, on Friday one of my classmates raised his hand and since it was the only hand up the teacher kind of reluctantly pointed at it. 'If that's what he wanted to say all along,' this student complained, 'why couldn't he have just come right out with it and saved us a week?' And everybody laughed, of course, primarily because it was true in some sense."
Well, quite.
My thanks to MacLehose Press for the review copy courtesy of NetGalley.
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 December 2018
Top reviews from other countries
- Ashley CrawfordReviewed in the United States on 3 June 2018
A Great and Important Voice
- StephenReviewed in the United States on 12 June 2018
A postmodern novel on social injustice and our perception of time.
