The Grift: A Novel
by Debra Ginsberg
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Book Summary Information
Author: Debra GinsbergEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-08-12
ISBN: 0307382729
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Crown
Book Reviews of The Grift: A Novel
Book Review: "Love, so messy uncontrolled and selfish"
Summary: 4 Stars
In one of the most bizarrely melodramatic novels I've read this year, author Debra Ginsberg says much about the nature of fortune telling in a story where damaged characters play out their petty dramas and squabbles against the sun-bleached surrounds of San Diego. A contemporary drama rife with an eclectic cast of characters including their unwanted pregnancies, sexual obsessions and marital infidelities, clairvoyant Marina Marks runs from the stifling heat and humidity of Florida, a place she considers a backward swamp with its ignorance and heavy superstitions hanging over her like a dark cloud. As a child Marina was told she has the gift, but it was her drug-addicted and junkie mother who had stumbled on the bright idea of pimping Marina out as a miniature fortune-teller. An outsider who plays by her own rules, over the years Marina has perfected her act of the unexplainable "woo woo" visions of the future that everyone so desires. But it was her mother's desire to extract a quick buck from wherever she could find it that has forced Marina to constantly look over her shoulder. Only in Southern California can Maria's own fears perhaps finally give away to something resembling confidence.
Able to set up a shop in Encinitas, with little problem other than the competition from three other psychics in town, Marina still doesn't really believe that psychic ability exists at all. But it is a visit from the elderly Mrs. Golden when she was still in Florida, and a strange dream, along with Mrs. Golden's multi-carat trillion cut ruby rings that dangles from the end of her neck on a long chain, that convinces Marina that something otherworldly and ominous is afoot. In the end, the valuable ring was given to Marina with love and then a vision of Mrs. Golden's son appears and a dream that he's in danger with dark and evil forces constantly surrounding him.
Tainted with a rather cynical view of the world, Marina reads the fortunes of guests at a holiday party hosted by the wealthy Madeline Royal, who has been having her readings conducted by Marina for quite some time now. Even as the party-goers line up outside her makeshift tent, Marina cannot help but hide the slivers of resentment that stab at her the old wounds had long scarred over, beginning to ache. It is also here that she meets the colorful cast of characters which provide much of the melodrama to follow. Madeline is desperate to get pregnant with her fifty year old husband Andrew, who heads a wildly successful chain of jewel making stores. A heavy drinker and a misanthropist, Andrew is resentful of his wife's attentions to Marina and is convinced that Marina is nothing more than a cheap charlatan. Madeline had come to Marina in a panic about not being able to get pregnant. Having a baby is not only an insurance policy, but an extremely small sacrifice to make her future security.
Then there's Eddie with women as his drug of choice which make him do stupid things and leave him with great regret. After falling into an affair with Cassie, who claims she's pregnant, this family man can't help feeling that he had done nothing to bring on the giant mess his life was in. Realizing that hope and despair are two sides of the same coin, and no matter which side it lands on when it flips, either one could make you believe in the impossible. There's also Cooper who is insanely in love with Max, but Max, a psychiatrist can't admit he's g*y. When Cooper isn't fanatically stalking Max at his office, he's popping Xanax and drinking too much Shiraz while also begging Marina for some sort of council as he trusts her more than anything in his life.
When Gideon Black, "his teeth straight and very white, his hair thick and wavy," mysteriously arrives and woos Marina, his presence becomes too hot, like electricity. Marina intuitively reacts to this strange man's presence probing for more, certain that this attractive and affable man is willing to fall in love with her: "when he touched her - she saw flashes of light and the shadows of people who weren't there." When the unthinkable happens and terrible fire occurs, Marina's carefully orchestrated world of fakery begins to shatter and her clients' animosities are held against her - and against each other. Accused, she tries to remain unflustered, but then her dreams spin out of control, becoming a warning, swirling into a potent mix of negativity, her mind a collection of images she can't stop from coming on rapid succession: "the red gleam of the ring magnified a thousand times."
As Ginsberg's melodrama races forwards, her characters become ever more desperate, vicious and crude, all of them fearful and afraid of being alone, of love and recognition, the unusual failure, of pain and of death. While the plot teeters towards the ever more outrageous, and everyone gets nastier, Marina realizes that the unrelenting urge to explain everything away and to bring the world under her control, has been her undoing. None of these characters are that nice, although much humor and silliness comes out of their anxieties and fears. What makes Marina so likeable however, is her delicate vulnerability and her witty powers of observation, and also her ability to analyze her clients even as those observations are mutated by the shifting kaleidoscope of visions she sees before her. Mike Leonard 2008.
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