Nymph

(by Stephanie LaCava)

You could say this novel follows its narrator, Bathory (Bath for short, pronounced Bat) from her childhood in the Boston area to her college and post-college years in New York, and it does, but that might imply something a lot more straightforward than this book. This book is elliptical, slippery, operating with the logic of a dream, with the resonance of magic. When she’s a teenager, Bath finds out her parents are an assassin and a spy; this explains a lot about her mom’s large collection of baseball caps and about her dad’s associates, whose faces always seem to be obscured by sunglasses. In her college years, Bath cultivates a certain “detachment”: she has sex with older guys and has “no close female friends”; none of the guys really matter to her except for one, Iggy, who’s the son of one of her dad’s associates who appears in and disappears from her life at irregular intervals, echoing the disappearance of her father and the increasingly distant nature of her mother. “I’ll either become a translator or an assassin,” Bath says to another guy; maybe she ends up being both, which is probably apt for a kid whose name, when she was little, made her think of herself as “girl-animal-weapon.”

There are lots of great sentences and phrases in this book, like when Bath’s mom gives her a stack of books by Dion Fortune and says “this is a way to teach you about magic things. And that a good story shows its middle not to have been the end, but that happens only at the end.” A few pages later, Bath’s mom offers further advice: “The signals will come in and you will know they are signals but not always how to translate them.” Thinking about Iggy, Bath feels that “you could know a psychic link with someone to be true, a chime waiting to sound in you both from birth”; later, also about Iggy, there’s this: “There had to be a word for that, when something makes you uneasy because it’s familiar and correct, and everything else is not.”