In Post-9/11 New York, a Newlywed Reckons With Her Own Lost Past

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THE EXHIBITION OF PERSEPHONE Q By Jessi Jezewska Stevens To the artist in love, a woman’s face is only a suggestion of what her portrait could be. “For centuries painters have been falling for their models, marrying their models, replacing their wives with mistresses-as-models,” says the narrator of Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s debut novel, “The Exhibition of Persephone Q. ” She recalls Egon Schiele and his Wally, Rembrandt and his Saskia (as well as his servant Hendrickje), and of course Picasso, the “Olgas, Doras, Jackies” of his life immortalized and yet unrecognizable in his abstractions.

“I couldn’t help but notice that when I compared the photographs of these women to the paintings in which they appeared, they almost never resembled themselves,” she worries. “The lover’s perspective transformed her. She was no longer the woman that she herself, glancing into the mirror behind the easel, would expect to see. ” Our narrator did not expect to receive an unaddressed envelope containing the exhibition catalog of the novel’s titular show, nor did she expect it to be the work of her ex-fiancé, a man she hasn’t seen in 10 years.

Opening at a Manhattan gallery on Sept. 12, 2001, it is a series of photographs of a naked woman asleep in a bed, her face turned away. Behind her the city’s most identifiable landmarks — the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the twin towers — have been digitally removed from the skyline. Most surprising of all is that, on second glance, she realizes the woman in the image is her.

“It should not take so long,” she thinks with muted shame, “to identify oneself. ” This coming from someone who goes by the sobriquet Percy Q, eliding the name her mother gave her, one so ordinary it is “plain to the point of cruelty, as if she wanted me to disappear. ” Being unnamed — or, rather, renamed — doesn’t seem to bother her. Being untitled is another story.

[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of March. See the full list. ] Percy lives in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside with her husband of a few weeks, Misha. It is November 2001, and the city Percy wanders is full of missing faces plastered on brick walls, shrines to desperate grief or unreasonable hope — a population of people who never came home.