The Fig Book

For now, and for our purposes here, every man is Bob. A blisteringly funny and sharp-edged beauty of a debut novel about a newly engaged couple house-sitting for a wealthy artist in a remote manor, whose relationship unravels into a darkly elemental absurdist romp. The heroine of The Fig Book is delighted to wake on her first morning in the lavish house she and her “Bob” are lucky enough to be calling home for the moment. It belongs to the successful, self-satisfied landscape artist who’s entrusted it to their care, along with the care of his dog. The view is remarkable. The dog is learning surprising new tricks. But all Bob wants to do is film them and put them on the internet. Feeling increasingly alienated, she goes back over the many Bobs she’s known and been known by. All that sex and all that shame, it turns out, has a seething lasting power. As she finds herself conversing more with the dog than with the man she’s supposed to be in love with, our heroine begins to shed the old human constraints, setting into motion a series of astonishing and unnerving events that continue to spiral until they’ve managed to upset the delicate balance of the natural world beyond even the damage humans have already wreaked upon it. Exquisitely economical and audaciously original, The Fig Book is a cry of feral rage, a bull in the china shop of the male ego, a failed love story that cracks open into an ecological folktale. The three-part narrative unfolds in taught, funny, burnished blocks of prose that draw us into an extreme, exhilarating, and entirely unexpected moral universe.