Starred review from March 28, 2022
With its three versions of a romance, Rosewood’s exquisite and experimental novel in stories (after If I Had Two Lives) offers a transfixing meditation on love, envy, and obsession. Each story explores the relationship between two characters named Eve and Liam, with details about their lives changed. “The Mute Sculpture” follows Eve, a gifted artist, from college through her mid 20s. She is fixated on her beautiful roommate, Pari, and compulsively sketches her. The drawings eventually earn her an exhibition in Florence, but her career flags after she marries Liam, a furniture maker. They have a son, and Eve struggles with insecurity as a wife and mother. In “The Soft Shackle,” Eve’s paintings of Pari launch both artist and subject into fame. In this iteration, Pari, a scientist and model, is pregnant with middle-aged Liam’s child. But at Liam and Pari’s wedding, Liam pines for Eve, whom he met in Florence before Pari. “Being Eve” finds Eve and Liam as a long-married couple—childless, old, and mulling over their “easy life,” with Eve working as a teacher and Liam a figure of steady support. Each iteration builds upon the previous one, culminating in a brilliant harmony made all the more aching for its exploration of all that the characters cannot have at once. Throughout, Rosewood mesmerizes with her own artistry, such as this depiction of Liam consumed by Eve’s paintings of Pari: “It was as though Eve had inserted herself inside, invaded Pari’s body with dabs of her own feelings, her paint.” This is stunning. Agent: Stacy Testa, Writer’s House.