Susanna Moore belongs to a small class of writers whose work performs the paradoxical miracle of giving solace by offering none. For all their sensuous engagement with the Hawaiian landscape of her childhood (which led to the myopic critical judgment that there was something restrictively “lush” going on), her first three novels, My Old Sweetheart, The Whiteness of Bones and Sleeping Beauties, contain alarming — and unalarmed – confrontations with cruelty, desire, violence, betrayal and death.
It took the controversial and nationally bestselling In the Cut to wake the dozing consensus to a writer whose imagination has always been informed by seared understanding and a shaming innocence, and to establish her reputation for not shirking the darkness.
She cares about getting it right at the level of the sentence, delivering scrupulous, unflinching prose without a single metaphor or simile readers will have seen before. If Martin Amis is right in characterizing quality fiction as a “war against cliché,” then Moore is making an inestimable and bloody contribution to the fight.
Her book, , deals with the rise and fall of Nazism, seen through the eyes of an ambitious Irish ingénue — a choice of narrative viewpoint typical of the author’s seductive (and, frankly, enviable) knack for sidestepping the obvious
