Rameau's Niece

This witty companion to Rameau's Nephew, Diderot's light-footed masterpiece, traces the vagaries of a young woman's life as it begins to duplicate the surprising gyrations of an eighteenth-century lascivious novel she has uncovered. Along the path of temptation, love, lust, folly, and reconciliation through the sophisticated labyrinth of contemporary Manhattan, we join this delightful young Candida on her cockeyed quest for truth. Margaret Nathan is the scholarly though mortifyingly forgetful author of The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, an unlikely best seller celebrated by feminists and by deconstructionists, and soon to be a television movie. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical Columbia professor, Margaret seems blessed - until she finds herself seduced by the libertine novel she has discovered in the library. Thus begins a series of amorous contretemps that plunge Margaret into the maelstrom of contemporary sexual practice, until she is washed up panting on the farther shore of self-understanding. A screwball comedy of ideas, Rameau's Niece is insightful, affecting - and hilarious. At once an affectionate satire of New York intellectual life and a moving account of a young wife's coming-of-age, it confirms the stylistic accomplishment and command that critics hailed in Schine's previous fiction while advancing her work to new heights of comic complexity and psychological insight. Rameau's Niece is one of the funniest, most original, and most delightfully readable novels of the season.