If you know David Orsini’s first book of fiction, Bitterness Seven Stories, you again hear the Orsini voice that is historicized and internalized by Henry James’s tantalizing style, by Edith Wharton’s naturalism and social ambiguities, and by Virginia Woolf’s existential moments of choice and consequence. Orsini has mastered the art of choosing the precise word for every moment—for the narrators’ perceptions and for the emotional tensions between reality and illusion. Not only are the days and their adventures “disguised or dislocated.” Prisoners of Desire is made up of contrasts that mirror the conflicts in nature, people, human behavior, and the social and psychological expectations of both character and reader. In this carefully crafted novel, situations deemed conventional by today’s moral standards are complicated by multiple levels of psychological and naturalistic issues as well as by questions of life and death, trust, honesty, and judgment. Orsini turns our assumptions upside down and leaves us shocked by unexpected manipulations and revelations.

The world at the beginning of Prisoners of Desire is not the same world at the conclusion. The characters are not the same people whom we thought we knew when the misadventures began. While the unpeeling of the past and of the psychological layers of personality are helpful in understanding why the characters act as they do, what they do and feel is a constant surprise. There is an admirable resolution in the plot, but no real ending, at least for me. Instead, we are left wishing there were more to come so that we could see into the future suggested by the circumstances, youthful indiscretion, choices, and consequences. In every way, Prisoners of Desire is superb literature.

Lois A. Cuddy received her Ph.D. from Brown University. She is Professor Emerita of English, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her books include T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Evolution and Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880 to 1940. Her articles on authors as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, Eliot and Homer, Samuel Beckett and Dante, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others, have appeared in journals in the United States, Canada, and Europe.