Undone

A masterful satire for our time, this is a novel about celebrity envy—and the anarchic imperatives of desire. The antagonist, a down-on-his-luck and malcontent young man, sets out to destroy a successful older writer by devising and unleashing a diabolical scheme to ruin his reputation and seize his fortune. He accomplishes this by enlisting his eighteen-year-old girlfriend to pose as the writer's lost daughter, but with a mission to seduce him, report him, and sue for emotional damages. The scheme turns on switching DNA samples so that the teenager's claim to be the writer's daughter is believed. What ensues is a descent into psychological nightmare for the famous writer. As readers, we know that the girl is not his child but, like watching Othello fall to Iago's masterful manipulations, we are riveted by this cruel trick, this coldly calculated destruction of another human being—this tragic spectacle of an upright man brought low by the evil of envy and the...