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In fiction, a serial killer is typically a contrivance, even in suspense novels about serial killers. Usually it's a means for an author to set in motion a gruesome mystery and give the protagonist something to do for two-to-three-hundred pages. There's a serial killer lurking the shadows of Sabina Murray's second novel, A CARNIVORE'S INQUIRY, who carries the evocative moniker William "Bad Billy" Selwyn. Murray doesn't reveal him until the end, in a remarkable anticlimax, but she mentions him repeatedly throughout this messy novel, calling up his name to distract from the real culprit of a ghastly string of murders.
At the center of this hubbub is Katherine Shea, a woman in her early twenties who, as the novel begins, has just returned from school in Italy. Before she even gets off the train from the airport, she seduces an older man, a Russian writer named Boris Naryshkin, and immediately moves in with him. Apparently, he is so desperate that he doesn't even question her homelessness, her motives, or her interest in him. It's the first of many events in A CARNIVORE'S INQUIRY that strain credibility and compel readers to scratch their heads in bafflement.
Vacationing in Maine with Boris, Katherine manages to persuade her benefactor to put her up in a bayside cottage, after which she invites a street musician named Arthur to live with her. A young man named Malley, whom Katherine meets in a bar, eventually turns up dead, his throat apparently slashed. And on the night Katherine attends a concert, one of Arthur's bandmates disappears. Either Murray wants us to know who the real culprit is from the very first page, or she holds her readers in egregiously low esteem.
As Katherine hurtles forward through the novel, Murray exposes more and more of her past, which grows increasingly and incredibly sensationalized as A CARNIVORE'S INQUIRY progresses. As a child she dug up her dead cat for company; as an adolescent she seduced the son of one of her father's clients during a dinner party; later she dropped out of school, more interested in sleeping with her teachers than taking their classes; as an adult she fled her father's private investigators across Europe, finally gaining illegal entry into the United States via a stolen passport. On one hand, this back story, unveiled incrementally, reframes Katherine's present-day exploits in more complex terms and with higher stakes, which keeps readers on their toes and breaks up the longeuers of academic regurgitation; however, it also makes the story more and more ridiculous.
Murray also allows Katherine to expound at tedious length on a variety of subjects, all of which pertain to cannibalism and all of which intrude on the action of the story. Within ten pages, she inserts a lengthy aside in which Katherine imagines a meeting between Amerigo Vespucci and Cristobal Colón. Over the course of the novel she retells stories of incidents as well known as the Donner Party and the Mignonette and as obscure as the French spree killer Martin Dummolard and the Australian outlaw Alexander Pearce. Murray has obviously done her research; the problem is that she obviously wants her readers to know how much research she has done. At times she's overinsistent about the pertinence of these asides, and other times they seem entirely too contrived coming from the mind of a woman who admits to being a poor student.
It doesn't help that Murray writes in prose that sounds rushed, reckless and underedited. In addition to numerous typos and long passages of consecutive clunky sentences, A CARNIVORE'S INQUIRY is riddled with misplaced participles. For one example of many, Murray writes, "The night air was cold, but with no wind I found it pleasant." Had she had wind, the reader is led to believe, Katherine might have enjoyed it less.
All of this is unfortunate, as Murray showed such promise with her previous book, a short story collection called THE CAPRICES, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award. This follow-up, however, transcends disappointment and achieves something closer to embarrassment. Ultimately, with all the thoughtless prose, congealed story structure, unself-conscious tedium, and pretensions about art, mortality, life and cannibalism, A CARNIVORE'S INQUIRY is nothing but schlock: readers may end up laughing at Murray, not with her.
--- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
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