Ruled by his hunger for erotic encounters, a deeply wounded psychoanalyst seduces both patients and strangers with equal heat. Driven to compartmentalize his life, the doctor attempts to order and contain his lovers as he does his collection of rare netsuke, the precious miniature sculptures gifted to him by his wife. This riveting exploration of one psychoanalyst’s abuse of power unearths the startling introspection present within even the darkest heart.
Netsuke
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Sex and psychosis are indistinguishable in this killer new novel from Ducornet (The Fan-Maker's Inquisition). An unnamed psychoanalyst narrator has a habit of having sex with his patients. At the risk of losing his practice, he descends into a co-dependent affair with a self-destructive woman he calls the Cutter, and later becomes obsessed by the torrid sex he has with a cross-dressing patient who suffers from split personalities. Affluent, psychotically self-absorbed, and as emotionally damaged as his patients, the doctor is just shy of a monster and lives in a twisted, sultry world that Ducornet poetically and viscerally describes, down to the effect of excessive sex on the texture of his skin. After he drops a series of clues to his affairs, the question becomes what will happen when his neglected and suspicious wife finds out. For a relatively short novel, this is unexpectedly heavy, as fascinating as it is dirty and dark, and while Ducornet's prose is initially overbearing, the plot is impossible to resist. (May)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
“Sex and psychosis are indistinguishable in this killer new novel from Ducornet. . . . [A]s fascinating as it is dirty and dark, . . . the plot is impossible to resist.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. One is grateful for what she’s accomplished here.”—The New York Times
“Judging by her new novel, [Ducornet] has not lost ground. . . . Netsuke, a short novel that seethes with dark energy and sinister eroticism, still has power to shock, maybe even to appall. . . . Our society is numb to explicit depictions of sexual acts. The perversity, decadence, even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there’s pathos too.”—Boston Globe
“’When the very air of one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air,’ ponders the narrator of Port Townsend author Rikki Ducornet’s brief, fervent novel Netsuke. . . . Written in lyrical, sensuous prose, as if shrouded in a fog of humidity, Netsuke emerges as a character study of a man in crisis.”—The Seattle Times
“[Ducornet] writes novels in delicate, precise language. . . . [Netsuke] is an introspective study of the life of a bad man—or is he a man who just keeps making bad decisions?—who can't stop abusing his power.”—The Stranger
“[A] finely crafted object of a novel . . . . Ducornet weaves a complex tapestry of various and repeated colors, textures, and designs. . . . The total effect is simply remarkable, an austere yet somehow lush beauty. At times this chilling tale seems neo-gothic, reminiscent of the work of Patrick McGrath, though much more compact. Ducornet has the extraordinary ability to compress an explosive tale of violence and repression in a small, tight container. . . . [W]e are simultaneously repulsed and entranced as the disturbing but gorgeous story accelerates to its foregone conclusion.”—Rain Taxi
"Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet's passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon's knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets." —William Gass
“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.”—Joanna Scott
“There is the time before you open Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke and then there is only the time in which you are reading—a searing present of heart-swallowing secrets, warped eroticism, betrayals, and insight trellised against the page in nightshade-gorgeous prose.” —Forrest Gander
“Linguistically explosive. . . . Ducornet is one of the most interesting American writers around.” —The Nation
“Ms. Ducornet writes with velocity, immediacy, and impact. It only takes a few pages to be caught up in the mind of the doctor. . . . This story has some fascinating insights and no-holds-barred language that is reminiscent of the work of the famed psychoanalyst and author Irwin D. Yalom’s novel, Lying on the Couch. Though the doctor couches all of his actions as empathetic and for the “good of his clients,” his real intentions are as transparent as glass. He is like a feral cat that has been put in charge of the hen house."—New York Journal of Books
“Rikki Ducornet travels . . . literary terrain with an assured, lyrical voice that consistently fascinates.” —Los Angeles Review
“Ducornet is a novelist of ambition and scope. One is grateful for what she’s accomplished here.”—The New York Times
“Judging by her new novel, [Ducornet] has not lost ground. . . . Netsuke, a short novel that seethes with dark energy and sinister eroticism, still has power to shock, maybe even to appall. . . . Our society is numb to explicit depictions of sexual acts. The perversity, decadence, even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there’s pathos too.”—Boston Globe
“’When the very air of one’s marriage grows thin and dim, there is nothing to do but set out to find a richer, brighter air,’ ponders the narrator of Port Townsend author Rikki Ducornet’s brief, fervent novel Netsuke. . . . Written in lyrical, sensuous prose, as if shrouded in a fog of humidity, Netsuke emerges as a character study of a man in crisis.”—The Seattle Times
“[Ducornet] writes novels in delicate, precise language. . . . [Netsuke] is an introspective study of the life of a bad man—or is he a man who just keeps making bad decisions?—who can't stop abusing his power.”—The Stranger
“[A] finely crafted object of a novel . . . . Ducornet weaves a complex tapestry of various and repeated colors, textures, and designs. . . . The total effect is simply remarkable, an austere yet somehow lush beauty. At times this chilling tale seems neo-gothic, reminiscent of the work of Patrick McGrath, though much more compact. Ducornet has the extraordinary ability to compress an explosive tale of violence and repression in a small, tight container. . . . [W]e are simultaneously repulsed and entranced as the disturbing but gorgeous story accelerates to its foregone conclusion.”—Rain Taxi
"Netsuke comes at the summit of Rikki Ducornet's passionate, caring, and accomplished career. Its readers will pick up pages of painful beauty and calamitous memory, and their focus will be like a burning glass; its examination of a ruinous sexual life is as delicate and sharp as a surgeon's knife. And the rendering? The rendering is as good as it gets." —William Gass
“Rikki Ducornet can create an unsettling, dreamlike beauty out of any subject. In the heady mix of her fiction, everything becomes potently suggestive, resonant, fascinating. She exposes life’s harshest truths with a mesmeric delicacy and holds her readers spellbound.”—Joanna Scott
“There is the time before you open Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke and then there is only the time in which you are reading—a searing present of heart-swallowing secrets, warped eroticism, betrayals, and insight trellised against the page in nightshade-gorgeous prose.” —Forrest Gander
“Linguistically explosive. . . . Ducornet is one of the most interesting American writers around.” —The Nation
“Ms. Ducornet writes with velocity, immediacy, and impact. It only takes a few pages to be caught up in the mind of the doctor. . . . This story has some fascinating insights and no-holds-barred language that is reminiscent of the work of the famed psychoanalyst and author Irwin D. Yalom’s novel, Lying on the Couch. Though the doctor couches all of his actions as empathetic and for the “good of his clients,” his real intentions are as transparent as glass. He is like a feral cat that has been put in charge of the hen house."—New York Journal of Books
“Rikki Ducornet travels . . . literary terrain with an assured, lyrical voice that consistently fascinates.” —Los Angeles Review
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Power is a potent aphrodisiac, especially fraught with the potential for inappropriate - and potentially devastating - intimacy when between psychoanalyst and patient. The psychoanalyst in Rikki Ducornet's Netsuke is never named, but the crux of the novel involves a man obsessed with having sexual relations with his clients. His name seems moot; the fact he's a doctor so deeply mired in his own psychological distress is the crucial element, not his name.
Akiko, a collage artist who sells her work at exhorbitant prices, is the doctor's wife. Independent from him financially, because she makes exhorbitant amounts of money from her career as a collage artist, she is very emotionally invested in their marriage. Sensing, perhaps not consciously, he's at the least closer to his patients that is appropriate, Akiko appears the oblivious spouse. However, her intellect and attention to detail hint otherwise.
Married for ten years, the doctor has not so much fallen out of love with his wife as begun to see her more through admiration of her purity than as a sexual object. At the same time he loves her for her dedication, he hates her for it nearly as much. She's so ethically good, still lovely, and treats him with trust verging on saintly, yet he finds himself dropping clues to her about his unfaithfulness. His mental issues involve lack of impulse control as well as narcissism as he drags his wife through an ever-increasing chain of events leading downward.
The doctor manages to keep his home life largely separate from his increasingly kinky and depraved affairs, aside from the occasional hints to Akiko, until he meets a woman he calls the Cutter.... Read more ›
Akiko, a collage artist who sells her work at exhorbitant prices, is the doctor's wife. Independent from him financially, because she makes exhorbitant amounts of money from her career as a collage artist, she is very emotionally invested in their marriage. Sensing, perhaps not consciously, he's at the least closer to his patients that is appropriate, Akiko appears the oblivious spouse. However, her intellect and attention to detail hint otherwise.
Married for ten years, the doctor has not so much fallen out of love with his wife as begun to see her more through admiration of her purity than as a sexual object. At the same time he loves her for her dedication, he hates her for it nearly as much. She's so ethically good, still lovely, and treats him with trust verging on saintly, yet he finds himself dropping clues to her about his unfaithfulness. His mental issues involve lack of impulse control as well as narcissism as he drags his wife through an ever-increasing chain of events leading downward.
The doctor manages to keep his home life largely separate from his increasingly kinky and depraved affairs, aside from the occasional hints to Akiko, until he meets a woman he calls the Cutter.... Read more ›
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
**semi spoilers below**
The main character in this short novel would be at home in a Roth novel. His sexuality is all-consuming, even perverse, and it torments him. As the novel begins, he is able to maintain a careful balance between his comfortable, solid home and professional life and the sordid "interstices" (his word) where he betrays wife and profession. He seems to exude an animal magnetism at times, but most often his sexual liaisons are with those who seek help from him. As a psychoanalyst, he has access to wounded and needy people, and he takes the almost cliched view that he is helping them as he screws them.
The first part of the novel is told almost entirely from his point of view. We get to know his wife, Akiko, and his patients (or as he calls them, "clients") only through the lens of his torment. The second part, which makes up the final 3rd of the novel, switches to a third person narration that allows us to see the damage he is doing as his life and interstices mix together and collapse. I found the ending to be too rapid, and though descents such as his do occur, I felt like Ducornet robbed the novel of some of its power by having his life unravel so quickly. The ending felt a bit like Checkov's early plays where, though the ending is appropriate, it is somehow at the same time lacking in power. Checkov, of course, went on to write masterpieces like The Cherry Orchard; perhaps Ducornet has a potential masterpiece in her as well.
The main character in this short novel would be at home in a Roth novel. His sexuality is all-consuming, even perverse, and it torments him. As the novel begins, he is able to maintain a careful balance between his comfortable, solid home and professional life and the sordid "interstices" (his word) where he betrays wife and profession. He seems to exude an animal magnetism at times, but most often his sexual liaisons are with those who seek help from him. As a psychoanalyst, he has access to wounded and needy people, and he takes the almost cliched view that he is helping them as he screws them.
The first part of the novel is told almost entirely from his point of view. We get to know his wife, Akiko, and his patients (or as he calls them, "clients") only through the lens of his torment. The second part, which makes up the final 3rd of the novel, switches to a third person narration that allows us to see the damage he is doing as his life and interstices mix together and collapse. I found the ending to be too rapid, and though descents such as his do occur, I felt like Ducornet robbed the novel of some of its power by having his life unravel so quickly. The ending felt a bit like Checkov's early plays where, though the ending is appropriate, it is somehow at the same time lacking in power. Checkov, of course, went on to write masterpieces like The Cherry Orchard; perhaps Ducornet has a potential masterpiece in her as well.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Netsuke is the story about a married psychiatrist who sleeps with his patients. The narrative is lyrical and at times blunt and this novella was an unexpected gem.
Author Rikki Ducornet does an excellent job at getting inside the doctor's mind and at expressing his thoughts. This psychiatrist is unwilling to stop cheating on his wife and has been living this secret life for many years.
He seems to want his wife to find out about his infidelities, he drops clues often, but she turns a blind eye. The wife, Akiko, is a successful artist, often away due to her work. This is the doctor's third marriage and the couple live well off because of their professions. The doctors lover's all have issues and he seems to enjoy playing with fire this way. One of his partners is a young woman who cuts herself, another is a cross-dresser. He has no shame in his sexual encounters, whether they occur in his office or in his home. He even schedules his affairs into his week on a regular basis, i.e. Fridays afternoons are kept open for sex with patients.
The doctor himself is despicable, not only is he unfaithful, but he is taking advantage of his patients. I couldn't help but be sucked into this story and was curious as to whether he would get caught. He was unstable and impulsive, and his actions kept shocking me until the final page. When he wants to impress a patient, he goes out and buys new clothes, bringing his wife along for her opinion.
I felt he both loved and hated his wife. He resents her for his own unfaithful ways, blaming her for his behavior. His complex character is what made the story. I found it ironic that the doctor was the one that needed the therapy.
This is the type of book that you read slowly.... Read more ›
Author Rikki Ducornet does an excellent job at getting inside the doctor's mind and at expressing his thoughts. This psychiatrist is unwilling to stop cheating on his wife and has been living this secret life for many years.
He seems to want his wife to find out about his infidelities, he drops clues often, but she turns a blind eye. The wife, Akiko, is a successful artist, often away due to her work. This is the doctor's third marriage and the couple live well off because of their professions. The doctors lover's all have issues and he seems to enjoy playing with fire this way. One of his partners is a young woman who cuts herself, another is a cross-dresser. He has no shame in his sexual encounters, whether they occur in his office or in his home. He even schedules his affairs into his week on a regular basis, i.e. Fridays afternoons are kept open for sex with patients.
The doctor himself is despicable, not only is he unfaithful, but he is taking advantage of his patients. I couldn't help but be sucked into this story and was curious as to whether he would get caught. He was unstable and impulsive, and his actions kept shocking me until the final page. When he wants to impress a patient, he goes out and buys new clothes, bringing his wife along for her opinion.
I felt he both loved and hated his wife. He resents her for his own unfaithful ways, blaming her for his behavior. His complex character is what made the story. I found it ironic that the doctor was the one that needed the therapy.
This is the type of book that you read slowly.... Read more ›
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Mass Proton
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Those of you who were addicted to the HBO series, "In Treatment", and who are devastated by the cancellation of Season IV, must read Netsuke (Ducornet). The psychiatrist, and narrator, is clearly Paul Weston. His emotional peregrinations continue and are brought to a somewhat abrupt (4 vs 5 stars), but reasonable conclusion.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
For Those Interested In Psychological Fiction
Reminiscent of Nabokov's Despair, Netsuke is a tale of one man's unhappiness spurred by mental illness and a lifetime of alienation. The novel is divided into two parts. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Liz W.
5.0 out of 5 stars
amazing piece of literature
This is a captivating and creative roller-coaster of a ride through the mind of a deranged shrink. It is intriguing and ironic and beautiful and compelling all at the same time. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Aileen
3.0 out of 5 stars
A book about sex that isn't very sexy
This story of a doctor who is driven by his need for erotic encounters, isn't particularly erotic. The author focuses on the darkness inside the main character, rather than the sex... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Rebecca Benson
3.0 out of 5 stars
If you don't like your characters, get rid of them
The author of this book must have not liked her characters as much as I did, because she killed them in a car crash at the end! Read more
Published 14 months ago by Ulalume Jones
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sticks With You ...
I won a copy of this book from LibraryThing in their Early Reviewers Giveaway this past April. I've decided for this review I'm not going to follow my usual format of breaking it... Read more
Published 23 months ago by Mandy
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing
I say this with some sadness: I found this novel very disappointing. The characters have no life in them. They come across as literary constructs. Read more
Published on June 12, 2011 by Literaryxplorer
3.0 out of 5 stars
Character Study in its Purest Form
Netsuke is primarily a character study of several characters. The first is the psychoanalyst who uses his practice to take advantage of several of his clients, many of whom deal... Read more
Published on June 11, 2011 by Sheldon Nylander
3.0 out of 5 stars
Netsuke, by Rikki Ducornet
Netsukes are tiny Japanese sculptures that reflect important aspects of Japanese folklore and life. (1) In the novella, "Netsuke" by Rikki Ducornet, they become a symbol for the... Read more
Published on May 25, 2011 by Francis C. Cary
5.0 out of 5 stars
powerful glimpse into a dark and darkening sexuality
Not for the faint of heart or those who blanche or blush too easily, Netsuke nevertheless is a taut and focused journey into the darklands where sex is compulsion and sickness. Read more
Published on May 22, 2011 by Middleman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Portrait of an Unraveling
Rikki Ducornet's novel "Netsuke" is a masterful exploration of a malign psychoanalyst, addicted to deceit, betrayal, and lust. Read more
Published on May 22, 2011 by Barbara Breger
