The Autobiography of Jenny X

He’s not the center of the story, but in Dan Orsini, Dierbeck (One Pill Makes You Smaller) has created one of the most recognizable and fully realized characters we’ve read in ages. In her second novel, Dierbeck tells the many stories of Dan’s wife Nadia, the girlfriend of Christopher Benedict, senator’s son and leader of the Aktionists. A radical political performance group, the Aktionists threw art stunts and consumed acres of drugs until one stunt went too far, and Benedict ended up in prison. His girlfriend Jenny flees the group, and remakes herself as Nadia, a fairly successful photographer married to a celebrated oncologist. But Christopher keeps sending her letters, and when Dan begins opening the mysterious envelopes, her false life unravels, too.

Reminiscent of Christopher Sorrentino’s Patty Hearst novel, Trance, Dierbeck investigates the damaged psychology of runaways, and runaway politics. Nadia/Jenny must keep a mental catalog of all of her lies, while convincing herself of the value of her new life. Christopher, meanwhile, thinly menaces from within solitary confinement and from the past, the kind of person whose idiosyncratic charm a reader can appreciate but never fall sway to.

But in Dan we find the unstable lynchpin of the book. He’s a man attempting to piece together the shrouded past of his wife, while also diligently scrubbing his own. He’s spent years basking in the comfort of family life, now facing a shock out of his complacency. While his wife is thinking of Christopher’s dangerous beauty, he’s using a shoehorn to put on his dress shoes. In other words, like the reader, he’s coming to all of these questions of identity late and a little slowly, even as the book’s pace heats up.

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