Inside (Borzoi Books) [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Alix Ohlin (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 5, 2012 | Series: Borzoi Books

“A skillful storyteller . . . attractively quick-witted and wry.” —J. M. Coetzee
“Ohlin has a great eye, a great ear, and all the other equipment auguring a very successful future.”—Jay McInerney
“Expect to hear her spoken of in the same reverent breath as Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams.” —Heidi Julavits
 
 
From the highly acclaimed author of The Missing Person and Babylon and Other Stories, a resonant novel of entwined lives and a woman with an unsettling ability to broach the innermost dynamics of the people around her.
      When Grace, an exceedingly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man who has just failed to hang himself, her instinct to help kicks in immediately. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A woman mistakes a man for a log—and so starts Alix Ohlin’s engrossing novel, Inside. The novel jumps between decades, locations and characters with a precision that makes Ohlin’s hard work seem effortless. The novel is full of surprises and things to admire, but the writing is genuinely clever because it always serves the characters. Inside is a novel about people. It is beautifully crafted and beautifully told.” —From the citation for the Scotiabank Giller Prize nomination

“Spanning a twelve-year period, the story moves briskly between New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, Kigali, and the Inuit community of Iqaluit. As the protagonists try, and fail, to establish connections with other human beings, Ohlin charts their small victories and larger disappointments. She is skilled at making her chilly cast of characters accessible, and even their most unlikely actions make sense, thanks to her tightly drawn portraits. And, while the novel’s premise is hardly comic, its Hollywood scenes show off the author’s satiric flair.” —The New Yorker

“Alix Ohlin’s wondrously engrossing Inside and Signs and Wonders display her characteristic strengths—dynamic plots, keenly observed settings, and characters so idiosyncratic, ambivalent, and contradictory they could be your family, your neighbors, people you work with… She has a rare gift for examining the confusions of the 21st century, exploring the ways in which addictions, afflictions, attractions, and random impulses shape our lives.  Her intense and beautifully shaped new novel and stories offer tentative yet illuminating answers.” —Jane Ciabattari, The Boston Globe

“A writer who should be famous… Ohlin has as unsettling an old soul as Leonard Cohen’s.” —T.F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“Superb [and] captivating… Next to brilliant phrases and scenes of laugh-eliciting satiric jabs, there are brutal, heartbreaking circumstances.” —Bret Josef Grubisic, National Post

“Ohlin’s combination of smooth prose, thematic reach and structural ambition makes for a novel that is both easily accessible and demanding in the best of ways… What’s true of all good fiction applies even more emphatically here: Inside, though fully satisfying the first time through, all but demands a second reading. It’s something most readers will be more than happy to do.” —Ian McGillis, Montreal Gazette

“An original novel about a timeless theme: the persistent difficulty of loving and well-meaning people to connect to one another.... Ohlin writes in elegant prose that is flush with wit and style, as clever and smooth as Lorrie Moore.... The closing lines of Inside are like a rose in winter bloom. Ohlin's novel runs with an undercurrent of hopelessness. Her characters have a hollow-ness inside. But Inside is, ultimately, a novel about hope. It begins with a gesture of despair and ends with one of promise. Who are these people? They are all of us.” —Sean Carman, The Rumpus

“Twisty, clever, and captivating... Dynamic.... There’s no fuss in Ohlin’s pointed prose, but plenty of insight... the title also makes for an unintended endorsement of Ohlin’s skills; this cunning writer yanks you inside her world.” —Mary Pols, The Philadelphia Enquirer

“Can any of us really save another person?  Or is each of us solely responsible for his or her own life?  That's the question lurking behind [this] astute novel... Ohlin is a master short-story writer (see Signs and Wonders), and the early chapters may feel like discrete tales. Very soon, though, you'll see how they're all intertwined.” —Leigh Newman, Oprah.com

“Twisty, clever, and captivating… this cunning writer yanks you inside her world.” —Mary Pols, The San Francisco Chronicle
“Psychologically astute, emotionally resonant… Ohlin allows her readers to know her characters more fully than any of them will ever know each other… A quiet novel populated with beautifully drawn, complex characters that will get inside the heart as well as the head.” —Florina Pendley Vasquez, Shelf Awareness

“You can’t help but become invested in Inside. Ohlin displays a profound empathy for people at their least rational—and most human.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A memorable read….consistently surprising, often devastating as the protagonists find themselves unable to share what’s on the inside.” —BookPage

“Alix Ohlin is a crazy talented writer, smart and soulful.  Inside is, in a word, stunning.” —Beverly Lowry

“In her gripping novel, Alix Ohlin covers vast geographical and emotional territory.  With extraordinary power, she takes us inside the profound and fragile connections of her deeply human characters—each searching for salvation from the past while struggling to find forgiveness and redemption in the present.  This story of surprising turns, grace, and compassion left me feeling that my world and my heart had grown larger.” —Keith Scribner
 
"We’re lucky to live in a world with a writer as gifted and as graceful as Alix Ohlin. This book is instantly engrossing, engaging, and moving. I began to think I lived inside of this beautiful and absorbing novel, so real were her characters, so complicated and human their plights." —Robin Romm
 

About the Author

Alix Ohlin is the author of The Missing Person, a novel; Babylon and Other
Stories; and Signs and Wonders, a new collection. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices, and on public radio’s Selected Shorts. She lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches at  Lafayette College.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (June 5, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307596923
• ISBN-13: 978-0307596925
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #732,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A lovely book. July 7, 2012

By Jessie R.

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I will let others describe the plot, and say that, quite simply, I loved this book. Maybe this is an old complaint, but I think a lot of books marketed as literature these days are word-clever, but lack emotional pitch or complexity. As Nabokov noted of Chekov, Alix Ohlin has given us a picnic basket and a wriggling puppy besides.

I guess lately I've become tired of reading about failed men and women, worn and regretful divorcees. So I was grateful that, although those character types exist in "Inside", Ohlin allows them to inhabit some qualities of that role as well as transcend it and achieve a sense of, forgive the pun, grace. Because that's what this book is about, one of the things, anyway, the recognition and acceptance of another's complete personhood, failures and wrong turns included, the only thing that sustains us in the long run.

I was so taken in with Ohlin's writing that I was sad when I realized that Grace, the eponymous protagonist, doesn't exist in the real world because I loved her character so. Then I got the sense that somewhere out there, a Grace does exist, and Ohlin has just put her on paper rather than the other way around.

My highest recommendation.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a must-read June 8, 2012

By E. Stafford

Format:Hardcover

I love all of Alix Ohlin's writing--from her first collection of stories, Babylon and Other Stories, to her first novel, The Missing Person. But Inside is my favorite work of hers to date.

Inside is aptly titled given that Ohlin has a preternatural ability to penetrate her characters' minds and hearts. This, even more than Ohlin's gorgeous prose and carefully crafted plot, is the reason to read Inside. As Ohlin maps out the lives of her disparate characters--from an up-and-coming actress in New York and L.A. to a former relief worker in Rwanda--she makes visible the inner workings of absolute strangers. (I say strangers because as I read Inside, I began to feel that Ohlin's characters were actually real people I didn't use to know and now do.) In making visible what is dim at best in others, Ohlin offers the possibility that this kind of seeing may not be an impossible feat--and that we therefore may also see others, and be seen, with an eye not just to the specific form our troubles have taken but also to our kinship.

When reading Inside, I was reminded of D.H. Lawrence's "Odour of Chrysanthemums," in which a woman, when presented with her husband's corpse, confronts the reality that she never really knew him--the implication being that we can never really know another. 'Was this what it all meant - utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living? In dread, she turned her face away." Inside is so beautiful because Ohlin doesn't turn away.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must read July 5, 2012

By Christa

Format:Hardcover

Wonderful book! Once started I could not put it down.
Alix Ohlin has beautifully written about the Human Condition, the innate tendency in all of us towards the "Gute Gestalt" and the courage it takes to begin "Der Weg Nach Innen".
I look forward to reading everything that Alix writes and wish her the best on her life's journey.