About Yvonne [Hardcover]

Donna Masini (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1997

An edgy, tour de force about the nature of obsessionan auspicious debut by a dazzling literary talent. "I have been stalking my husband's lover," begins the narrator, Terry Spera, in this riveting erotic journey of one woman's quest for the truth. Mesmerized, we watch as Terry begins to follow Yvonne through the streets of Manhattan, to her apartment on the Upper West Side. We watch her break into that apartment, steal Yvonne's clothes, use Yvonne's name. We watch as Terry begins an affair with one of her students; runs into Yvonne at the gym; gets pulled into her husband, Mark's, seductive web. And all the while we, like Terry, veer from certainty to uncertainty. Is Mark having an affair? With breathless energy and sardonic humor, About Yvonne takes New York City as its psychic base. It negotiates between the Soho art world and the Upper West Side, a Jesuit retreat house and psychotherapy, an Italian Catholic childhood and the pull of sexual desires. It illuminates the dim and fragmented terrain of an inner life, the vagaries of sexual lives, the difficulty of living a stable life in a city of distractions. This compelling, beautifully crafted novel is the story of New York at the end of the century and a woman at the end of her rope.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What happens when a stalker is female and the object of her obsession is her husband's suspected lover? What happens when the setting is New York City, captured through the stare of suspicion and paranoia? Donna Masini answers these and other questions in About Yvonne.

Terry Spera suspects her husband of having an affair, so--like any self-respecting woman scorned--she takes to stalking. Sharpening the oft-told tale of a woman's relationship to--well, to her relationship--is a kind of alluring creepiness; About Yvonne explores obsession-compulsion and its build toward madness through the accretion of minute details. Terry records her observations in this first-person narrative through uncomplicated, breathless sentences; it is, in fact, a novel of declarative sentences that advance in surprisingly flat tones, as if the very force of their accretion will destroy her rather than the weight, shape, or taste of the details.

Poet Donna Masini was awarded The Barnard New Women Poets Prize for her first collection of poems, That Kind of Danger.

From Booklist

The prizewinning young poet Masini has taken to prose with elan and written a keyed-up and sexy novel about obsession, betrayal, and love. Terry, an Italian Catholic who grew up in Brooklyn as the oddball single sibling in a family of twins, lives in Manhattan with her art gallery owner husband, Mark, and teaches college literature. She adores Mark, and they have a hot and intricate love life, but all is jeopardized when Terry finds out that Mark is having an affair with a woman named Yvonne. Yvonne also teaches literature, resembles Terry in size and shape, though she is pale and Waspy, and works out at the same club. Something snaps inside Terry. She secures a set of keys to Yvonne's apartment and starts spending her afternoons there, trying on Yvonne's clothes, snooping through her things, imagining her with Mark, and turning her pain and rage into weirdly ritualized aberrant behavior. Her activities become more and more risky and risque, an escalation Masini chronicles with convincing precision in scenes notable for their graceful composition and psychological heat. Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 303 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393040917
• ISBN-13: 978-0393040913
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,000,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books written in the last few decades., January 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: About Yvonne (Paperback)

Donna Masini's "About Yvonne" is one of the best books that I have read. I actually became absorbed in Terry's world never quite knowing what she would do next yet feeling that we shared the exact same emotions. Donna Masini is one of the most gifted American writers that I have come across in the past few years. Though the characters' language can be coarse, Masini's writing never loses its flowing, beautiful quality. Terry Spera is a unique literary creation in that she is a stalker who knows that she hunts her husband's possible lover, knows its wrong and yet in clandestine rebellion she is proud of her actions. I cannot wait until her next novel or next book of poetry is published, and I am sure that I will devour it the same way that I have "About Yvonne".

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I had to force myself to finish it., March 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: About Yvonne (Paperback)

It is pieces like About Yvonne that mystify me as to exactly how some authors manage to get published. Trudging though this book was almost a chore (luckily, it was short and didn't require much deep speculation). The main character is so desperately shallow and pathetic it is impossible to feel any kind of sympathy or empathy for her. The book is so replete with annoying redundancies and cliches and clumsily written "erotica," it probably would have been better if the author spared us and contained it to a short story. Masini writes about New York like a person who has never been to New York, writes about art galleries like a person who has never been to an art gallery, and writes about sex like a person who's never...well, you get the idea.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Psychological insight -- real and uncensored, February 25, 2004

By 

Susan K. Perry "Susan K. Perry" (Los Angeles, author of LOVING IN FLOW (BunnyApe.com)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: About Yvonne (Paperback)

Just finished it. Loved it! Masini has explored with uncommon honesty what it feels like to be lost, to be obsessed, to be haunted by the fact that one's beloved is sleeping with another. Her language never hits a false note. I didn't see this as a "New York book" but as a tale about what goes on inside the mind of someone not capable of thinking clearly at the moment. I found the narrator, the central character, to be utterly believable and real. Just the right amount of suspense, and just the right amount of redemption (not much, but enough).