A resident of New York, Jody Shields is the former Design Editor of the New York Times magazine and a former Contributing Editor of American Vogue and House and Garden. The author of two non-fiction books on fashion, she has also written several screenplays and is a collected artist. The Fig Eater is her first novel.
If I say that this novel is set in Vienna in 1910 and takes as its starting point the idea that Freud's most famous patient, Dora, has been found mysteriously murdered in a public park, that probably makes it sound like a pedantic reworking of familiar material. In fact, it is astonishingly original and vivid. The plot centres on the parallel search for the killer by a police inspector and, unbeknown to him, by his Hungarian wife and her friend. This looks at first like an interesting, if somewhat obvious, contrast between the logic and rationality of the man's approach, and the insight into the unconscious deployed by the two women. It is true that the inspector uses a scientific approach while his wife uses the Tarot and Gypsy folklore. But as the inspector's investigation takes him deeper into the dark psychology behind the sex-related murder, mere scientific rationality becomes inadequate. The women achieve more success in pursuing the most obvious clue: the murdered girl had eaten a normally unobtainable fresh fig just before her death. Both investigations go beneath the respectable surface of haut-bourgeois Viennese life to uncover, just as Freud's analysis of the real Dora did, sexual blackmail, incest, sado-masochism, and other forms of perversity. The distinction between victim and abuser turns out to be complex, while fascinatingly, the relationship between the inspector and his wife is changed fundamentally by the revelations that are made. One of the chief attractions of the novel is the laconic and elegant style. The writing is vivid and highly visual, but reveals very little about the characters' feelings. Understanding and judging the motives of the characters is, with brilliant effectiveness, left to the reader. Review by CHARLES PALLISER. Editor's note: Charles Palliser is the author of The Quincunx and The Unburied. (Kirkus UK)