January 15, 2022
A writing professor receives an unwanted package from her father and ends up a cowherd at a rural art museum. At the opening of Beilin's new novel, a 36-year-old woman named Iris has just received an upsetting delivery containing dispatches from a traumatic childhood: two letters her father wrote to her during her adolescence and an unfinished play she wrote during those same years, all of which her father has just uncovered while cleaning out his house. As Iris prepares to meet her friend Ray at a cafe in Philadelphia, she meditates on the abuse she experienced in her family; meanwhile, her rheumatoid arthritis flares up, and the pain in her feet causes the feet to take on lives of their own (they're named after characters in a Flaubert novel; this is the sort of intellectual content that populates Iris' rich inner life and thus the novel). After talking with Ray about children who are made scapegoats by their families, Iris and her feet set off on a northward journey, in which she trades her gritty Philadelphia for the bucolic backdrop of a rural art museum in New England, "the mARTin," where she takes on a new identity and becomes a cowherd. At the mARTin, nothing is as expected. Beilin navigates this slip into the surreal with ease and grace; though the narrative is, at times, profoundly strange, it's never hard to follow. Most impressive, perhaps, is the darkly comic strain that persists throughout the novel; though the narrative involves childhood trauma, domestic abuse, addiction, medical exploitation, and the Holocaust, Iris' wholly unique voice makes for a very funny work. This wide-ranging, idea-driven novel leaves the reader with much to think about, deftly provoking questions about the nature and ethics of trauma and contemporary art. A fresh, funny, and striking experimental work with surprises at every turn.
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Starred review from January 31, 2022
The explosive latest from Beilin (after the memoir Blackfishing the IUD) is at once a multilayered satire and an earnest depiction of personal pain and loss. Thirty-six-year-old Iris, an adjunct professor at an art school in Philadelphia, receives a package from her estranged father containing letters he wrote her while she was a teenager, in which he blames her for the family’s many troubles. Re-traumatized by receiving these letters and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis so intense the pain speaks to her (“When you are the scapegoat in your family, your body becomes your family. When you get sick, your body begins talking to you, too”), Iris leaves her house and her drug-addled husband, taking off in a friend’s sputtering old Subaru. She ends up in New England with a job as a cowherd at a rural museum where the cows were shipped over from the site of a German concentration camp. It’s a world of art and artifice, where the museum’s husband-murdering benefactor also lives on site. Meanwhile, Iris attempts to forge an understanding of her historic role as the family scapegoat. The author lands on an infectious and perfect blend of cultural criticism, wry writing advice (“Don’t bother writing a character since people change”), and magnificently weird storytelling. Belin’s account of reemergence manages to be both hilarious and deeply moving.