New novel re-stages classic ‘Rebecca’
Author To Speak in Cobble Hill
Famed author Meg Wolitzer described Rachel Pastan’s debut novel “This Side of Married” as “a wedding bouquet of great wit and affection” and Booklist praised it as “smart and insightful.” Pastan followed that up with the novel “Lady of the Snakes” in 2008, of which NPR’s Maureen Corrigan declared: “I was hooked from the opening scene” and the Washington Post observed: “Pastan’s writing is fluid and frank, and her characters are luminescent.”
Since then, the graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop found herself working at a small contemporary art museum, allowing her to explore the intersection of the art and literary worlds. And her new colleagues, who kept invoking her predecessor in the job, also provided the inspiration for her stunning new novel, “Alena” (Riverhead Books), which she will discuss in Cobble Hill on Feb. 20 at BookCourt.
“Alena,” in which a young curator finds herself haunted by the legacy of her predecessor at an art museum on Cape Cod, is a brilliant restaging of Daphne du Maurier’s classic, “Rebecca”—one of the most popular novels of the 20th century and later an Academy Award-winning Hitchcock film—as well as a stirring exploration of beauty, envy and the nature of originality.