A Small Indiscretion

1 of 7
A Small Indiscretion
336 pages; Random House
Thirty odd years ago, after her alcoholic father spends her savings, a broke and lonely Annie Black lands a job with a handsome, unhappily married architect. Seduction ensues as her boss' wife openly conducts an affair with a photographer who, in turn, conducts an affair with—yes, you guessed it—Annie Black. All this soap-opera action makes for delicious, lazy-day reading. Just don't underestimate the writing. Ellison describes her various love triangles in lavish prose, such as the daydreams that fill Annie's life with "a colored emotional fluorescence with which the plain waking world could not compete." Other parts of the book revolve around Annie's later life as a mother and her adult son's mysterious car accident. While these add tension—will her son survive? What do his past mistakes have to do with hers?—the real strengths of this novel are the foggy, intimate flashbacks that so perfectly capture the sexual and romantic confusion of a young woman in a foreign land who thrills at the pleasure of buying a cheap scarf or eating dinner at the boarding house ("the thick gravies, the custards and puddings and soft, fat rolls") and believes that "any false step I made now would be mine alone. Any foolish moves would be private business that had no bearing on the hopes and dreams of others." As if our pasts stay where they were created—and never follow us home.
— Leigh Newman