Joyce Carol Oates - Double Delight

Dust Jacket Blurb

The straitjacket of upright respectability and the anarchy of aroused sexual desire are the twin poles of Rosamond Smith's sensational new psychological thriller—a master writer's nightmare tale of sweet seduction and heartless corruption that is as taut as terror.

Terence Greene, a man seemingly without flaw or weakness, is a model husband, father, citizen, with a picture-book home in the affluent New Jersey suburbs and an ideal position as director of a great philanthropic foundation.

It is while performing his lawful duty as a member of a jury that he first sees exotically beautiful Ava-Rose Renfrew. She is testifying against a man accused of brutally assaulting her, and Terence tries to tell himself that he is stirred by her plight and not her person. Naturally, he manipulates his fellow jurors into delivering a verdict supporting her. But his pretense melts like snow in fire when after the trial he makes contact with Ava-Rose at the ramshackle house in the rundown neighborhood where she lives.

Terence plunges into a searing sexual affair with Ava-Rose and enters the intimate circle of her raffish family, whose masks of warm friendliness and hearty vulgarity lift in unguarded moments to reveal monstrous manipulations of both his emotions and his bank account. None is more suspect than Ava-Rose herself, whose power over Terence grows as his passion becomes obsessive. Soon the little white lies he is telling at home, and the adultery his is committing with Ava-Rose, will become the very least of his sins.

This riveting drama of step-by-step sexual obsession and psychological disintegration moves in a deepening spiral of revelation and violence, with an unexpected ending. Once again Rosamond Smith proves herself a master of literate, intricately plotted suspense fiction. With Double Delight, she is at the height of her mesmerizing powers.

Excerpt

john the baptist Terence Greene had lately grown to see that we inhabit a world of ever-shifting facades, panels, mirrors, mirrors reflecting mirrors, in which a violent man might be shot dead fleeing a crime he had in fact committed and in which a woman might hang herself in despair of a fate she did not deserve; it was a world in which a man might disappear, indeed dissolve, into a river, and no one would know, or, perhaps, knowing, greatly care. Another man might plunge to his death in unspeakable terror and this plunge will subsequently be interpreted as the "inevitable trajectory of a poetic destiny" (for so the consensus now seemed to be among the late Quincy Ryder's friends and admirers, that the poet had not only committed suicide but had prefigured the act in his poetry, from his first book onward); yet another victim might boast, I do what I wanta do, man, just like you—even as his skull is smashed (for hadn't the flashlight shattered into pieces in Terence's hand, in that hideous dream, later wrapped up in the carpet with the body and tossed, like trash, into a ravine).

A world in which a young woman might be strangled by disembodied hands, a strangler's hands, belonging to no one.

Yet it was a world in which a lover might be led onward, as one submerged in water over his head will be led by the wayward movement of a straw connecting him with the air above, by a fragrance of rose petals.

A world in which, in fact, a man might be happy. A man long in search of Justice, very happy.

Never realizing until now I myself am Justice.

Reviews

Booklist, March 1, 1997, p1069
Library Journal, March 15, 1997, p92
Publisher's Weekly, April 21, 1997, p58
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1997, p673
Sun-Sentinel (Ft. Lauderdale), June 8, 1997, p11D
Boston Herald, July 13, 1997, p61
Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), July 20, 1997, p6
Dayton Daily News, August 24, 1997, p10C

Epigraphs

God is indeed a jealous God—
He cannot bear to see
That we had rather not with Him
But with each other play.

—Emily Dickinson

All things are possible, because all
things are ordained.

—The Book of the Millennium

Other Editions

paperback

Double Delight

by Rosamond Smith

New York: Dutton, 1997

356 pages

Dust Jacket Blurb

Excerpt

Reviews

Epigraphs

Other Editions