An innovative, globe-trotting, and sexy tale of modern connection and desire.
Compared by the New Yorker to the autofiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti, and Ben Lerner, this roman à clef is a love story like none other.
Vivian, a writer, is carrying on a relationship with an internationally acclaimed artist. There are those who stand to benefit—and suffer—from the revelation of her paramour's identity, so in the service of telling her tale she creates a series of fictional stand-ins. There is Tzipi, a sixty-eight-year-old Nobel Prize-winning female Israeli writer; Binh, a twenty-something Vietnamese video artist; Santuxto, a poetic Basque separatist; and Djeli, a Malian world-music star.
Vivian divulges the story of their relationship largely through correspondence, from the first meeting with her lover to their jumpy spam filter, which arrests the more explicit notes that result in Vivian being held captive in a tiger cage in a Berlin hotel in one version; chased by a Medusa-like woman on a Greek Island in another; imprisoned by a splinter cell of Basque separatists; in an African hospital with a bout of Dengue Fever.
“Browning likes a bit of contrived mischief,” praises The New Yorker, and The Correspondence Artist delivers an epistolary romance with captivating wit and intelligence.