FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
On one level, Susan Minot is best known for the honest, erotic prose introduced in her 1989 collection of short fiction, Lust and Other Stories. But her writing also possesses an insight into modern male-female relations that few writers achieve with such clarity. A must-read for men and women, her short novella Rapture delivers stunningly on both fronts.

Taking place entirely during a single, specific sex act between former lovers who meet after their relationship has come to its official end, Minot alternates segments of the pair's inner dialogue as the act progresses. Utterly self-involved, the two struggle to understand their own romantic motivations and the measure of affection they once held for each other -- or perhaps still hold.

Minot contends it's our self-absorption that dooms most contemporary relationships. And she articulates these symptoms with a finesse so subtle it's easy to be seduced by her characters before catching your breath with the realization that something is going awfully wrong. ("She was impatient to have him go...because she wanted him to stay..."; "He found he didn't so much want to let her know things as he wanted her response to them.")

Let's face it, modern romance bears a greater resemblance to the Push-Me-Pull-You in Dr. Dolittle than to Yuri and Lara in Dr. Zhivago. The lovers in Rapture are quintessentially of our day, and the pair reflect this in their selfishness and narcissism. In this short work, Minot captures an image of modern love that is both an honest analysis and a brutally frank commentary. (Ann Kashickey)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Four years after her critically acclaimed novel Evening, Susan Minot gives us a new work of startling intimacy and precision.

Using a single interlude–a brief encounter of old lovers; two bodies entwined on a bed at midday–Minot defines the distance that erupts at what seems to be the height of connection, as well as the extent to which the senses deceive, and the intensely private eroticism of fantasy and the imagination. Minot's lovers are mesmerizing in their individual journeys–one moving toward a kind of holy consummation, the other toward abnegation and blank despair. This is the wayward history of their efforts to make contact with each other while deluding themselves about the nature of the contact they're making. Graphic, erotic, provocative, Rapture is a meditation on romantic love, sex, and their reflections in the life of the mind.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine

Minot's latest book, which describes a romantic interlude between two former lovers, may encompass the longest and least titillating episode of fellatio in fictional history. The question is, Who will tire first: Kay Bailey, Benjamin Young or the reader? Former lovers estranged for more than a year, Kay and Benjamin somehow stumble into bed. As their interplay meanders toward resolution—his urges are numbingly simple, hers are hopelessly conflicted—the narrative moves between their interior monologues. Against her better judgment and to his amazement, they've plainly gotten together for the wrong reasons, yet their respective ruminations suggest that every romance they've experienced has been equally misguided. "People would never get together without some kind of hydraulic urging," thinks Kay, who nevertheless finds the sensual intimacy bringing her closer to Benjamin, as he drifts further from her. Minot has written often and well of lust's folly, but her characters here are so shallow and their predicament is so trite that it's as much of a challenge for the reader to sustain interest as it is for Benjamin. —Don McLeese

Publishers Weekly

Minot's new novella, set on the fringes of the film world, addresses one of her perennial themes, the different meaning men and women give to passion. Thirty-four-year-old Kay Bailey, a film production designer, has an affair with director Benjamin Young while they are shooting a film in Mexico. Benjamin, however, is engaged to Vanessa Crane, the girlfriend who has seen him through the ups and mostly downs of his filmmaking career. When Kay and Benjamin return to New York City, she tries to end the affair. But he is persistent, and what was casual becomes serious for Kay. All of this is narrated during one act of sex as, in alternating interior monologues, the two recall the events that have led to this moment. Engaged as they are, they do not speak; the landscape of their sex is entirely in their imaginations, and they could not imagine it more differently. While Kay comes to exalt the moment, Benjamin reveals himself as a cad, his life on the skids. Minot (Monkeys; Lust; Evening) has a great ear for the callow way people talk, scrupulously mimicking their groping thoughts and at times making a poetry of their inarticulateness: "She sort of sidewise conjured up a semidomestic arrangement tilting away from the totally conventional one she'd experienced with her parents." Moreover, Minot doesn't hide her characters' pretentiousness, as when Benjamin envisions his weak will as an "unfixable blot of doom" or Kay feels "altered in some big nameless way." All of which should add up to great satire, but Minot's novella is satiric only intermittently. She seems to take Kay's beatification seriously; even Benjamin is granted a cascade of sad and heroic images near his climax. The book is an odd amalgam, at times a smart satire, at times a way-we-live-now portrayal of 30-something life. Other times it just, well, sort of strains credibility. (Jan. 28) Forecast: The "he said, she said" premise is titillating, and readers will respond accordingly regardless of the critical reception. Some may grumble at the book's brevity, but the 60,000-copy first printing should sell out easily. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Two old lovers meet again for another erotic union, but their stories lead in different directions. With a ten-city author tour and a 60,000-copy first printing. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews