The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee: His Researches

"This darkly comic novel chronicles the life of Nicholas Dee, an earnest young historian whose crippling fear of loss has become his undoing. Lulled to sleep at night by the city's constant clatter of police choppers, Nicholas parlays his fear of losing everything into a promising idea for an academic grant: He will write a "History of Insurance."" "In this glittering, unidentified city of high culture and hideous crime, Nicholas can find no safe haven for the orderly life he desires. At night he is haunted by memories of his dead father; by day the devilish machinations of the university and the police ensnare him. His book, already evolving from a history of insurance into a compelling narrative tale (chronicling the creation of an opera house in seventeenth-century Holland), becomes his only refuge. "I had begun to lose myself, ever so slightly, in the handful of stories my life was generating: the opera house of Alton Motley beckoned me.... Memories of my father were gathering thick and last. Alive in the middle, l kept silent and observed the conduct of my researches into each of them."" "But his fragile stability cannot hold. While the city, washing away under ceaseless storms, descends into its midwinter carnival, Nicholas receives a phone call from the police. A curiously "gifted" illiterate boy named Oscar Vega has been arrested, and Nicholas becomes his custodian. The novel moves from stark realism into a kind of Kafkaesque grotesquerie as the real power behind these manifold changes reveals itself to him: Amelia Weathered, an ageless imperious dwarf, has set this vortex turning - it is into her seductions that he has fallen." ""'She,' as she was known to me for several weeks thereafter, emerged like a crushed star and occupied an invisible position of gravity around which my life soon began spinning." Gradually, and with supreme intelligence, Amelia takes possession of Nicholas - and his book. She kindles his love for Oscar Vega, letting stories of the boy's difficult life enchant Nicholas, and she demands his complicity both in her elaborate battles against the university and in her attempts to take over the writing of his book. Nicholas is hers when, at last, the dwarf's incredible links to his father are revealed." "They flee to Holland, pursued by the police, There, a harrowing journey across the frozen landscape - and seemingly backward through time - returns them to the origin of Nicholas's researches." "The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee is both a compelling mystery and a meditation on the nature of written history. In it, Matthew Stadler fulfills the remarkable promise of his earlier work, Landscape: Memory, which led Maureen Howard to call him "our finest young novelist in years.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved