The Exquisite: A Novel

By Laird Hunt

A “strange, original, and utterly brilliant” tale of longing, madness, death, and psychological gamesmanship in the wake of 9/11 (Paul Auster).
 
Henry, a New Yorker left destitute by circumstance and obsession, is plucked from vagrancy by a shadowy outfit with a decidedly niche business. They arrange staged murders of anxiety-ridden clients unhinged by the “events downtown” and seeking to experience—and live through—their own carefully executed assassinations.
 
When Henry joins this nefarious crew, which includes a beautiful blonde tattoo artist named Tulip, contortionist twins, and a woman referred to only as “the knockout,” he becomes inextricably linked to its enigmatic ringleader. The mysterious herring connoisseur Mr. Kindt’s identity can be traced through twists and turns all the way back to the corpse depicted in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson.
 
Substantive, stylish, and darkly comic, The Exquisite is a skillful dissection of reality, human connection, and the very nature of existence.
 
“Laird Hunt is one of the most talented young writers on the American scene today.” —Paul Auster, author of the New York Trilogy
 
“This noir labyrinth captures the post-9/11 gestalt of anxiety and hopelessness.” —Publishers Weekly
 
“Hunt's novels shimmer and shift like reflections on wind-stirred water.” —Booklist
 
“Hunt is an intellect and a great spinner of claustrophobic noir plots, and his erudite gumshoe yarn owes as much to Georges Perec and Gertrude Stein as it does to Paul Auster.” —The Believer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781566892605

Laird Hunt

Laird Hunt's most recent novel, Zorrie, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Hunt has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield­-Wolf Award for Fiction, the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, and Italy's Bridge Award. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence.

Reviews for The Exquisite

[palaverofbirds · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Reminded me a bit of David Lynch except for the fact that it wasn't bad and was meant to be understood.

[ternary-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I kept thinking about this book while reading Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation - which, they don't have a ton in common beyond their extremely unreliable narrators, but there's just a certain -mood- to both of them. Slow. Inevitable. Confusing, and plodding forwards in spite of the obvious confusion. Life is confusing. But I realized (as I was reading Annihilation) that I couldn't remember the plot of The Exquisite -at all-; just a strong sense of the mood and the fact that I quite liked it ten or so years ago when I first read it. Time for a re-read!So (and this is kind of embarrassing) I think the first time through I must not have picked up on much (any??) of the allusion to 9/11. It's everywhere. It's pretty blatant. It's the motivating factor for a lot of the weird. How did I not see it? Or maybe I did, and it just didn't stick in my brain. I still love the confusion, and sharing that confusion with the narrator. It's horribly ambiguous

[val8killpack · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Implacable, elegant, and sublimeThis is one of those books I want to quote a passage from. But, then, I realise to quote only one passage is a great disservice, and that I must, in fact, quote the entire book. I will ask you to sit down, now, and even force you--knock you out if necessary--and we will start at the beginning, (or so it seems...)In a post-9/11 NYC, this novel surfs the shattered psyche of one Henry and his loosening grasp on reality. Henry's self fractures into separate narratives, parallel and interweaving. As narrator and protagonist, Henry is unreliable and without a stable identity. Culture defines Henry; the unmentionable destruction of 911 creates multiple and disparate identities for him as a sort-of afterquake of the terror. It seems that the "self" has also been attacked. In fact, it seems, that there is a demand for a certain destruction of the "self" in NYC, and Aris Kindt fills this desire for fracture by attacking others with pseudo-murder. This is not unlike the dismemberment of the "self" depicted in Rembrandt's painting. Dr. Tulp facilitates this work, it seems, just as in the parallel narrative Tulip also--though more elusively--enables the undoing of lives. The self--and its fragmentation/destruction--is founded from cultural conditioning (such as 9/11). Aris Kindt speaks of this phenomena early in the text: "Are you sure I did? Are you sure it was me? This is, after all, in at least one of its guises, a city of subtle simulacra, of deceptive surfaces, of glib and phantom shimmerings" (2). This passage alludes to Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality and a self-identity and culture that is based upon another representation, rather than grounded in any substantial signified "X". Often, in fact, the simulacra is marketed to the public in order to propel the American capitalist machine. On 9/11, terror took down two magnanimous symbols of this corporate brainwashing industry, and it seems that the aftermath--as depicted by Hunt--consists of the fracturing of the hyperreal identities based upon the creative corporate marketing that stemmed from those corporations.Job appears in multiple places throughout the book, and one wonders, is Job actually a person, or is the identity "Job" merely a label applied by Henry? The narrator comments concerning the displaced identities running rampant in the text: "Unchecked, he said, our belief systems eventually overrun everything, blot out the world, at the very least rewrite the map" (23). Henry's belief system, as a matter of fact, obfuscates reality in favour of a certain and twisted mental projection.As a literary thriller and ghost noir, this text absconds from tradition and skirts the marvellous on one side and the uncanny on the other. In the end, the events are never explained as fitting in with the rules of reality as already existent (the uncanny), nor are the seemingly supernatural happenings meant to be accepted as part of a new suspension-of-disbelief world (the marvellous). The entire text, then, falls into the realm of the fantastic. The space of questioning, of being unsure and living in an unknown border-space, this mode of uncertainty pervades the pages right up until the end, which is an admirable accomplishment. Hunt has been careful to avoid a simple metaphorical or allegorical analysis, and bringing the text into the ambiguous and hesitant reality, though grounded in a realist and matter-of-fact tone, allows the reader to actively participate in the puzzle. A truly engaging read.