PAYBACK

An unhappy interaction between a private school teacher and a difficult student inspires a decadeslong revenge scheme.

From the title out, Gordon’s 20th book aspires to be a snappy, plot-driven novel with a premise based on reality TV—a socially current, Jodi Picoult–ish type of book. Agnes Vaughan, an art teacher at the Lydia Farnsworth School in New England, tries to embrace an extraordinarily miserable and universally disliked student named Heidi Stolz. But her suggestion that Heidi take a trip to the Museum of Modern Art in New York leads to a terrible misadventure for Heidi, and her initial reaction to hearing that Heidi went to a strange man's apartment is a bit harsh: “How could you have done that?” These six words set a disastrous course for the rest of both of their lives that culminates in a big, televised shebang several decades (and hundreds of pages) later and then a bunch of additional smaller shebangs as the book keeps refusing to end. Hung on the scaffolding of this silly plot is another sort of book entirely, a deep and dilatory character study of Agnes Vaughan, both her interior life (she is obsessed with the origins of words and the way we use language) and her biography (she quits teaching, moves to Italy, becomes an art restorer, has a child, has a grandchild, moves back to the U.S., all the while suffering continually for her supposed crime against Heidi). Major philosophical digressions abound—about the love of one’s work, about the love of one’s dog, about motherhood and marriage, about the persistence of “hatred and ugliness” in the world, and much more—and some of these are quite wonderful, but they end up feeling like ballast in the unwieldy mess that is this novel. Despite all Gordon's detailed fleshing-out of the ruminative Agnes, the villainous Heidi is completely nuance-free, with a backstory of Grimm Brothers–style grimness, hateable from the heels of her stilettos to the spiky tips of her hair, from her predilection for vicious lying to her enthusiasm for Ayn Rand. (As bad as she is, her mother is even worse!) And after all this, the ending—the long awaited payback—is unsatisfying, since the truth is never confronted and Agnes is never actually exonerated for her imaginary crime.

The marriage of shallow suspense plot and deep character study creates the wrong kind of page-turner.