![]() ![]() What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Despite some stilted dialogue, Davidson deftly orchestrates a startling collision between the classical and the contemporary, reality and play.Ī suspenseful cautionary tale: Don’t play games with strangers.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. As the players take their roles more and more seriously, the game becomes disturbingly unpredictable. Casting Ruth as the logical Pentheus, Anna as the irrational Dionysus, the game is replete with maenads and enforcers recruited and mobilized via Gchats, text messages and blog posts. ![]() Based upon The Bacchae-Euripides’ unsettling dramatization of the tensions between the rational and the irrational, between reason and passion-this game employs live-action role playing. The arrival of Anna’s charismatic brother, Anders, catalyzes a dangerous game, indeed. Players must-weirdly and erotically-reinforce the magical protective wards first set into the gardens and buildings designed by Olmstead and architectural giants McKim, Mead and White. ![]() Anna is soon inspired to develop her own, darker game that imagines evil forces impinging on the city itself. Both Lucy and Anna assist Ruth in constructing her latest game, Trapped in the Asylum, which uses contemporary technologies (GPS, smartphones) to recreate an 1890s community for the insane. Lucy’s tenuous, almost ghostly connection to life and Ruth’s eating disorder, however, pale in comparison to Anna’s past as a neglected child consigned to a psychiatric hospital. Yet each woman harbors a secret weakness. Their Swedish neighbor, Anna, has garnered a Fulbright scholarship to study the urban culture of outdoor gaming. Lucy, a poet and MFA graduate student, shares an apartment with Ruth, a postdoc in game theory and design. Role-playing games take over New York City’s Morningside Park with calamitous consequences in Davidson’s ( Invisible Things, 2010, etc.) latest novel. ![]()
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