Barbara A novel

A ghost town in the Rockies has been turned into a shabby movie set in 1975, where Murphy's sharply observant, lyrically inclined narrator, an actor adjusting to turning 40, reflects on her life. Through Barbara's memories and musings, Murphy, in a radical shift from her previous novel, Talking Animals (2020), incisively considers the shifting aesthetics of moviemaking and gradations of misogyny in the wake of the Manhattan Project (for which Barbara's engineer father worked), the atomic bomb itself ("Once it was dropped, it never stopped mushrooming."), JFK's assassination, and the Vietnam War. Barbara is haunted by her lovely, traumatized mother, who died by suicide when Barbara was 13, and her father's indifference. She flees the desert for the effervescence of New York, working an office job, learning to deploy her beauty, and taking acting classes. A summer stock gig leads to her first trip to Europe to shoot her first film, an intense, avant-garde take on the life of Saint Barbara. Her enduring love for daring director Lev brings luxury and anguish. Restless and inquisitive, Barbara is acutely sensitive to time, irony, the zeitgeist, metaphorical dimensions of filmmaking and nuclear physics, and power dynamics personal and professional. Murphy's atmospheric, Didionesque portrait of a creatively brilliant and cruelly underestimated "permanent outsider" is exquisitely perceptive and lushly resonant.

The elegant latest from Murphy (Talking Animals) traces the melancholy life of a movie star whose father worked on the Manhattan Project. The story begins in 1975 when the 40-year-old unnamed narrator is filming a western. The nonlinear narrative then jumps back to her teen years in Colorado, where her mother died by suicide when the narrator was 13. Unmoored by her mother's death, the narrator makes her way to New York City, where she studies acting before joining a summer stock company in Connecticut. Eventually, she meets the man she will marry, Lev Samaras, a director who filmed concentration camps as part of the Army Signal Corps. Samsaras casts the narrator in Saint Barbara, a movie about a Rapunzel-like character whose industrialist father collaborated with fascists during WWII. The narrator intertwines her personal history with reflections on her unnamed father, an engineer who worked on the atomic bomb ("The scientists had to do it all because it could be done," she says of her father's "ethical framework"). The novel, like its main character, drifts from scene to scene without much forward momentum, but the prose, particularly the descriptions of acting and filmmaking, is exceptional. Readers will enjoy this atmospheric work. Agent: Allison Devereux, Trellis Literary. (Mar.)