Bloomsbury USA

"The capturing of this woman�s manic depression is as impressively sustained a piece of writing as I can remember, a virtuoso mixture of humour, tragedy, frustration and pathos." The Times (London)

"(McGowan) has created a character multifarious and compelling enough to stand with literature's most deceptive and delusional, from Humbert Humbert and Holden Caulfield to the murderous gourmet of John Lanchester's Debt to Pleasure and the angelic half-wit of Lydia Millet's My Happy Life�" --BookForum

"Heather McGowan is the most elegant, arresting, and lucid prose stylist I have encountered in years."— Rick Moody

"Heather McGowan is a writer of fierceness and humor and intelligence, and in this book her writing soars. To take the thrill-ride that is Duchess of Nothing it helps if one is fearless, for the language is alive on every page, and unlike anything else out there." —Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

"Heather McGowan is a wonder, a real writer, a maker of mean, funny beautiful prose, and in Duchess of Nothing she's forged an unforgettable voice that perfectly captures the desperation and ruinous hope with which we often narrate ourselves through the world."—Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land

"If Molly Bloom could speak again, if Molloy could write to us from Rome, we would have something as bewitching as Duchess of Nothing, where Heather McGowan once again reclaims wit, philosophy and beauty as among the birthrights of great fiction."—Andrew Sean Greer, author of The Confessions of Max Tivoli

"As with her highly praised first novel, Schooling, McGowan's prose style in The Duchess of Nothing is so unique that no obvious contemporaries come to mind. You have to go back to Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles to find the apparent sources of her creative DNA.
This anachronistic blast of modernism really is a blast -- a riotous, sustained exercise in narrative voice that is disorderly without ever being entirely disorienting. - - Minneapolis Star Tribune

"If McGowan seemed to invoke High Modernism with her first novel, then she has reinforced that impression with this beautifully written, highly stylised hymn to a female J Alfred Prufrock ("There will be swimming pools without rats; I will eat food from a plate instead of digging for remainders in the sofa cushions"). Each word is exquisitely placed; each thought carefully honed. Five years have passed between Schooling and Duchess of Nothing; we must hope for a shorter interval before her next great work appears. Independent on Sunday (London, UK)

Monologues, mania, and evasions
An unsettling stay in Rome with McGowan's off-center heroine
By Richard Eder | March 26, 2006
Boston.com

" 'The tongue was made to hide your thoughts,' a Mafia strongman once told an interviewer. Not that it was his intention, but he had come up with the perfect tag for that literary figure, the unreliable narrator.

Few narrators could be less reliable -- her furiously beating tongue churns air -- than the protagonist of Heather McGowan's Duchess of Nothing. A duchess, that is, in her airily grandiloquent self-proclamation, and her duchy barely a quivering cobweb.

Bit by bit, in a monologue that drifts back and forth between brilliant glitter and pitiable unhinging, that asserts and withdraws, that plumes itself like a conqueror and molts a trail of bedraggled feathers, we get an approximate story.

McGowan gives her narrator no name, thus conveying the elusive track-covering, the shame that flickers beneath the arrogance. For convenience I will call her ''the woman." Having run away from her older husband, whom she refers to as ''the Bavarian," she lives in Rome with Edmund, a young Italian with a beautiful back of which we hear a great deal, and few other qualities.

Vague and unreliable bits of the narrator's past spill out. She had worked in a bank where, she variously announces, she had felt free and happy, and tyrannized and unhappy. The Bavarian was dull and stodgy; when she lit out for Europe she had taken a wad of his cash with her. Yet far from shaking his dust from her shoes, she holds on to the dust, as it were; nursing a smudgy resentment that he hasn't come after her.

Edmund's 7-year-old brother, or perhaps half brother (also nameless; she calls him ''the boy"), lives with them. Ostensibly the woman makes him the center of her world; in fact he is the mirror she performs to. She feeds him, dresses him, takes him on expeditions, and drills him continually in her skewed and inflated vision of herself and her life.

Edmund is elusive and often absent; the boy is her captive, the dukeling whom she will shape to redeem her failures and disappointments. She complains incessantly about the sacrifices she makes for him, about the trap that Edmund's lovely back has led her into.

''Where I was once my own person now I am simply the slut who boils your milk; that is the sole definition of my life today. Why? Because of beauty. So I will boil your milk every morning until I die spent and shriveled, bones ossified, death passing quite unnoticed."

Her didactic fantasy continues, the child dutifully taking it in. ''That's all, I say leaning and exhaling. That's the lesson. Beauty is fatal, the boy says quietly. If not beauty then love, I say carefully. Love is fatal, the boy amends."

The dialogue grows zanier after Edmund decamps, leaving an envelope of cash. She takes the boy to a trash-filled rise with an undistinguished view of Rome. She hates the famous views; she calls them sluts. (''Slut" is a favorite word; its ostensible contempt, we suspect, masks an abused and abusing self-contempt.)

''We must find beauty where no one has found it," she lectures. ''I wager even Hell is clogged with tour buses. We will arrive in that fiery place expecting to be the first to discover its beauty only to find it echoing with clamors for fried dough."

As their money runs out, the boy begins hesitantly to assert himself. He objects to her extravagances, is dubious about her plan, never carried out, to make a pie, and, worst of all, seeing a line of schoolchildren, announces he wants to live like them. It is betrayal: the first gash in her balloony vision of herself as godlike mentor.

Soon the air has leaked out entirely. Edmund returns to take them to his mother's home, prepares to send his brother to school, and tells the woman he loves her.

It is the ultimate threat and outrage, the latest onslaught from the outside world upon one whose life has been a chain of evasions and whose motto is: ''Wear your misery like an inky cloak. . . . Let it provide safe harbor from the turmoil of everyday joy." She flees, taking with her, of course, a chunk of Edmund's money.

''Negative capability" was Keats's term for the artist's power to create from the irrational, the instinctive, the uncertain. McGowan's woman carries this to a cold extreme where it congeals into negative incapability. ''Cold" may be the reader's principal response, despite the flashes of off-center and dismal brilliance that the author gives her protagonist.

The unreliable-narrator device serves to speak from around dark corners of reality that a straightforward telling can't convey. Used on itself, it has little to convey besides its own unreliability." - Boston.com

MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE:
Fiction review: The Duchess of Nothing by Heather McGowan

"A woman who has failed at love takes on the education of her lover's 7-year-old brother, who becomes her sole consolation.

The "Duchess" of Heather McGowan's new novel is exhausting in precisely the way that a lively dinner-party guest can be exhausting: breathless, hilarious, self-deprecating, digressive and alternately inscrutable and aphoristic.

That's a good thing, because beyond the ceaseless, frequently yammering monologues of the unnamed narrator, there's not much in the way of plot in The Duchess of Nothing. McGowan doesn't even offer a whole lot of concrete details with which a reader might get oriented in her odd but ultimately moving story.

That story -- such as it is -- is this: A woman is living in Rome with her lover, Edmund, and his unnamed 7-year-old brother, a boy she is purportedly responsible for educating. Once upon a time she had been a bank teller, and had been married to a man she abandoned after meeting Edmund at an inn in the Alps. As a young girl she had won a history prize in school, an incident she increasingly regards as the crowning achievement of her life. Fragments of this mysterious back story surface time and again, yet never in any sort of precise or concrete detail.

She and the boy spend most of their time lounging around their rooms in Rome. She smokes and talks (both incessantly). The boy listens. Occasionally they plan educational field trips, most of which are aborted. Her attempts at educating the boy consist of bursts of random rumination that seem like pure static one moment and philosophy the next. Sometimes she just lies in bed and engages in dreamy streams of consciousness: "A crack in the paint is making its way across the ceiling. I have always liked ceilings and found peace there. The more cracked the better."

Edmund eventually disappears, leaving the woman and the boy to fend for themselves in Rome. And then, as mysteriously as he had disappeared, he reappears, and this strange little dysfunctional family relocates to a place in the country.

All of this is genuinely weird yet oddly compelling. Slowly and incrementally, over the course of the novel, a real and touching bond develops between the Duchess and the boy. He is, she comes to realize -- too late, unfortunately -- all she really has.

There is a lovely moment late in the book, shortly after the move to the country, when the Duchess and the boy lie on a blanket outside and gaze into the night sky. "Don't be awed by the stars," she tells him. " ... There is certainly every reason to appreciate the night sky. But, in looking up, I ask that you never forget your finite shell. I ask that you never feel small and mortal or insignificant. Yes, we are staring at billions of years of unexplained collisions and the great unfolding universe. But your troubles are still of consequence. Don't tuck yourself away in a corner because life is too huge. Remember, no star has ever built a road. And I guarantee you no star ever wrote a beautiful book about a whale. ... I have no idea why everyone is so desperate to feel unimportant when it feels so good to be essential."

As with her highly praised first novel, Schooling, McGowan's prose style in "The Duchess of Nothing" is so unique that no obvious contemporaries come to mind. You have to go back to Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes and Jane Bowles to find the apparent sources of her creative DNA.

This anachronistic blast of modernism really is a blast -- a riotous, sustained exercise in narrative voice that is disorderly without ever being entirely disorienting." Brad Zellar, Star Tribune

Independent on Sunday (London) March 26, 2006 Sunday, First Edition
No place like Rome for a female J Alfred Prufrock

"Heather McGowan's first novel, Schooling, was a tour-de-force of stream-of consciousness' not the most approachable debut in the world, but certainly one of the most beguiling. Her follow-up is a far gentler affair, where experimentation with style and language has largely been eschewed in favour of a single controlling consciousness, that of the "Duchess" of the title. And what a triumph, and sheer joy to read, this is.

McGowan's unnamed narrator has left her husband and is living in Rome with her lover, Edmund. Edmund works in a cafe and every day he leaves her at home with his seven-year-old brother to look after. She has taken it upon herself to educate the young boy in an unconventional manner: no school, no uniforms, just meandering through the city while she talks to him about life, love and the universe.

As she does, we have glimpses into the past she chooses not to tell us about. She talks volubly about her husband (older, a customer at the bank where she used to work) and about her married life, which suffocated her. With Plath-like desperation she would attempt to provide her husband with perfect meals and a perfect domestic environment. But it is what she does not tell us that captivates: "things simple to boil, fruit that needed little preparation, from time to time a vegetable if I found the courage to prepare it." What kind of woman needs courage to prepare a vegetable?

A woman who is slowly drowning, is the answer. "Marriage is a tomb," she tells her young charge, who repeats this to his brother when he comes home from work that night. Edmund might be feeling that too - the next day he has gone, leaving the "Duchess" and the young boy just enough money for a few months' food and rent. She must provide for them both, but this is beyond her. Instead, the young boy takes over, insisting that they spend their money on sensible things like bread and milk, not frivolous hats and sunglasses." - Tami Reiker

"McGowan's narrator's view of the world is the artist's view, the madman's view, the outsider's view. Nothing is quite as it should be: tiny tasks are magnified beyond measure (it takes pages for her to consider how to bake a pie) and the outside world is always a threatening place. We are trapped inside the Duchess's head along with her, and it is a dislocating place to be. Having said that, McGowan invests her protagonist with humour, with life, with a fighting spirit even if those she fights against are entirely misconstrued as opponents (a woman buying gloves in a shop, for instance: "My aunt would have eaten this glove buyer for breakfast").

If McGowan seemed to invoke High Modernism with her first novel, then she has reinforced that impression with this beautifully written, highly stylised hymn to a female J Alfred Prufrock ("There will be swimming pools without rats' I will eat food from a plate instead of digging for remainders in the sofa cushions"). Each word is exquisitely placed' each thought carefully honed. Five years have passed between Schooling and Duchess of Nothing' we must hope for a shorter interval before her next great work appears."- Lesley McDowell