russellsmith.ca Muriella Pent

In the tradition of Martin Amis' The Information and John Updike's Henry Bech series comes this ambitious novel about the fray that ensues when intellectuals with different backgrounds and agendas meet under one roof. Russell Smith's first full-length novel since the critically acclaimedNoise, this post-colonial comedy is the story of what happens when Caribbean writer Marcus Royston, a worldly, Oxford- educated, jaded writer from the island of Saint Andrew's finds himself sent to Canada on a cultural exchange, and lodged in the sprawling art nouveau mansion of middle-aged socialite Muriella Pent. Royston's motivations are self-preserving, hers are self-advancing, and both find themselves pawns of the politically motivated arts committee behind the exchange program. When two young university students -- a boy and a girl who hate each other -- are drawn into Royston's fractious orbit, a decidedly unpleasant sexual competition occurs, and life in the leafy enclave of Stilwoode Park becomes more artistic than any of the exchange's sponsors had ever hoped. By turns funny, melancholy, and sexually depraved, Muriella Pent is told through a collage of dialogue, letters, newspaper articles, and diary entries. It is an unnerving satire about age and youth, desire and privilege, and about warring definitions of art among people from different parts of the former British Empire.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Finalist for the Rogers Fiction Prize

Finalist for the City of Toronto Book Award

Amazon.ca Editors' #1 Pick, Best Fiction of 2004

A best book of 2004, The Globe and Mail

A best book of 2004, The Toronto Star

A best book of 2004, Quill and Quire

Book bummers 2004, NOW magazine

"The best Canadian novel published in 2004 was Muriella Pent... Russell Smith is one of the best stylists of my generation. His prose is exact, surprising, and written by a man with a fine ear."

Andre Alexis, author of Childhood, in The Globe and Mail

"[Marcus] Royston, one of the most convincing characters I've come across in Canadian fiction... Interspersed with the biting wit is almost an elegiac quality to the writing... [Smith] is a successor to that rumpled mensh of St.Urbain Street... Smith's and Richler's styles and preoccupations differ, but there is a shared engagement in the world."

The Globe and Mail

"This is a valuable addition to the Canadian canon, rivaling the early work of another skilled satirist of the urbane and urban, Mordecai Richler. There is a roaring party scene that matches those described by Evelyn Waugh."

Ottawa Citizen

"Smith writes some of the most luminous prose in Canadian fiction... He mines and refines the best of what has come before on the way to making it his own. Also, Smith is entirely credible when writing female characters... [O]ne catches quiet echoes of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf."

The Gazette (Montreal)

"The heart of the novel beats in time with D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller... There's a gifted and sensually alert writer at the wheel here."

National Post

"Muriella Pent deserves to stand as one of the strongest Canadian novels of the year."

The Edmonton Journal

"[Russell Smith is] something of a literary heir to Margaret Atwood"

The Toronto Star

"[...] a novel of manners about ambitious young downtowners of an artistic bent, Muriella Pent is adroit and amusing. And in its depiction of one exceptional character, Caribbean poet Marcus Royston, it is very good indeed."

Maclean's

"The language is weirdly tight-assed."

Susan G.Cole, NOW magazine