DUPLICITY

Selgin presents a literary novel about the dark side of sibling rivalry.

When Stewart Detweiler, author and former instructor at the Metropolitan Writing Institute, arrives at a lake house in Georgia, the situation is bleak. Stewart’s twin brother, Gregory, has taken his own life. Does Stewart notify the police? Nope. He dumps the body in the lake and assumes his brother’s identity. While Stewart was scraping together a living at a tenement apartment in the Bronx, his twin enjoyed fame and fortune. Gregory was once a mild-mannered professor in Vermont, but that all changed. A chance encounter on an airplane inspired him to enter the self-help market with a book called Coffee, Black. The premise of Coffee, Black boils down to this: One is free to make changes in one’s own life. The book, published under Gregory’s new persona, “Brock Jones, Ph.D.,” became a runaway bestseller. Gregory became a changed man. This is all much to the chagrin of Stewart, who, though having a few published works under his belt, could never dream of the kind of success of Coffee, Black. If the basis of Brock’s message was that we can be whomever we want to be, why can’t his brother take the place of someone people adore? It seems like a good plan, yet Stewart learns that being Brock isn’t as carefree as he imagined. To add to the drama, this very text, the reader is told, has been hastily written on a series of composition pads.

The premise of a twin’s assuming the identity of his more successful brother sounds comedic. In execution, however, the story takes a more sinister tack. If, for instance, Stewart is going to successfully put his brother’s body at the bottom of the lake, he is going to have to stab it several times so it does not float to the surface. As Stewart points out, his brother is already dead. But does that make it OK? Back at the lake house, Stewart considers an obsession of his father (who was also a professor and also died by suicide) with twins and doppelgängers. Then, to complicate matters, it seems the lake is being dragged for a body. Never mind strange text messages Stewart receives on his brother’s old phone. This all culminates in an atmosphere that is thoughtful, tense, and fascinatingly morbid. By contrast, flashbacks to Stewart’s life are tame. The reader gets more than a few rehashes of what Stewart taught his writing students (e.g., how to write a pitch paragraph) and a clunky disagreement Stewart had with a barista concerning decaf espresso. Such recollections do not exactly leap from the page. Nor do they add much to this clearly troubled protagonist. After all, the reader knows well there is at least one body at the bottom of the lake.

Contemplative and charged; a thought-inducing thriller.