‘Cartwheel’ based on high-profile murder case
Published 5:00 am Sunday, October 13, 2013
“Cartwheel”
by Jennifer duBois (Random House, 384 pgs., $26)
Before she quotes Vladimir Nabokov, before she dedicates her new book to partner Justin Perry, novelist Jennifer duBois issues a disclaimer: “Cartwheel” is “entirely a work of fiction.”
Its themes, she allows, “were loosely inspired by the story of Amanda Knox,” the American exchange student convicted in 2009 of killing her English roommate in Italy. Turns out that many a fact lines up neatly, too.
Still, “Cartwheel” is so sure-footed and psychologically calibrated that the reader quickly loses track of the parallels. Amanda Knox was accused by police of turning a cartwheel while waiting for questioning; this novel’s protagonist, Lily Hayes, actually does. The story opens as her father, Andrew, flies into Buenos Aires to face police who suspect that 21-year-old Lily has knifed her study-abroad roommate to death.
“Andrew had worried about Lily constantly,” duBois writes. He “worried about her being kidnapped, trafficked, impregnated, sexually assaulted, afflicted with some horrible STD, arrested for marijuana use, converted to Catholicism, wooed by a long-lashed man with a Vespa.”
DuBois’ topic is serious, her touch often droll. Andrew, divorced from Lily’s mother, joins her to send Lily off to South America with an industrial-size box of condoms. The parents see this gesture as brave and mature; Lily experiences it as “appalling, mortifying,” a box meant “for cults, maybe, or university women’s centers.”
Reviewers of duBois’ first novel, “A Partial History of Lost Causes,” called it brainy and beautiful, a verdict that fits this successor. It flirts with overheating, almost trapping readers in a hothouse of American privilege.