That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious -- in short, she becomes his absolute obsession.
But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen's past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.
"With Cast in Doubt, Lynne Tillman achieves several different kinds of miracles. She moves into the skin of a sixtyish male homosexual novelist so effortlessly that the reader immediately loses sight of the illusion and accepts the narrator as a real person. Alongside the narrator we move into the gossipy, enclosed world of English and American artists and madmen living in Crete, and at every step, as the play of consciousness suggests, alerts, and alters, are made aware of a terrible chaos that seems only just out of sight. But what impresses me most about Cast in Doubt is the great and powerful subtlety with which it peers out of itself -- Tillman's intelligence and sophistication have led her toward a quality I can only call grace. Like Stein, Ashbery, and James, this book could be read over and over, each time with deepening delight and appreciation." -- Peter Straub
"Tingly, crisp, and wry.... Delightfully clever and probing." -- Donna Seaman, Booklist
"Tillman's evocation of Horace and his life among ruins both geographic and aesthetic is a tour de force. Cast in Doubt recasts every genre it touches-the expatriate novel, the mystery, the novel of ideas-like a multiply haunted house of both form and identity." -- Voice Literary Supplement, Best Books of 1992
"If you can keep up with him, Horace will take you all kinds of places.... I was unwilling to close the cover and break the spell. I turned the book over and started over again." -- Boston Phoenix
"A private eye in the public sphere, [Tillman] refuses no assignment and distils the finest wit, intelligence and hard evidence from some of the world's most transient artifacts and allegories. This is a truly memorable book." -- Andrew Ross
"Tillman . . . casts doubt on the basis of human cognition and our subjective knowledge of other people [in] this literate, diverting story." -- Publishers Weekly
Praise for Lynne Tillman:
"One of America's most challenging and adventurous writers." -- Guardian
"Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine -- not because I 'admire' her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel..." -- Jonathan Safran Foer
"Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman." -- Edmund White
"Anything I've read by Tillman I've devoured." -- Anne K. Yoder, The Millions
"If I needed to name a book that is maybe the most overlooked important piece of fiction in not only the 00s, but in the last 50 years, [American Genius, A Comedy] might be the one. I could read this back to back to back for years." -- Blake Butler, HTML Giant