Mary Gordon’s disquisition on love is fluid and engaging enough, which isn’t surprising given her experience. However it rests on a crude foundation of extreme characters and events which undermine the entire edifice. Central character Agnes is realistic enough, in a bland fashion, but her opponent, Heidi, is a two-dimensional monster, and the child of one-dimensional parents. Moreover, the plot hinges on a depressingly predictable rape and a one-line response to it. Such is the stuff of melodrama. Any amount of readable narrative can’t undo those tests to plausibility.

Control that is the major play here. Three young teachers bond in an exclusive school during their first years of teaching. The exploits of their young charges often sees them reflecting the trends of the day. Each teacher all with different disciplines and world views are the target of a revenge plot long in the making. Heidi one of their students is beyond rebellion, she hates her mother sees her father as weak and her world view is forever tainted by a sexual encounter gone wrong. Life has been manipulated by Heidi to conform to her need for revenge so much so she has risen to fame with a reality show that offers revenge to people wronged and seeking justice. It is a bitter pill to swallow at times through her eyes and when the opportunity to exact that pound of flesh comes she is as cold to her victim as she perceived her mother was to her all those years ago.

Now that I think about it, I’m hard-pressed to say whether love or revenge is more popular in literature through the ages. It seems like every great love story can be matched by an equally great tale of revenge. On the other hand, the fact that I’m thinking this way might say more about my reading tastes than about literature in general. One thing I can say definitively is that I’ve never read a story of revenge like the one in Mary Gordon’s troubling, thought-provoking novel, Payback.

Payback tells the story of two women who would always be united by a terrible crime and a critical failure. But, before we go back to find out what happened, we see these two women decades later in the very different places they’ve ended up. One, Quin Archer (formerly Heidi Stolz), lives a life of reality/exposé TV hustling in Arizona. She is surrounded by her prize cacti and the constant stress of trying to stay relevant to audiences. She curates her appearance as much as she attends on her cactuses. The overall impression is one of brittle soullessness. The other woman, Agnes di Martini (formerly Vaughan). Agnes’ life has all the emotion that Quin’s seems the lack. Agnes is packing up her life in Rome to return to the United States. Her memories are full of her family and a melancholy that we don’t understand until we see what Agnes has been punishing herself for.

It’s probably clear who has my sympathy. A few chapters into Payback, we learn that Quin (then Heidi) is raped on a trip arranged by Agnes. When she returns home, Quin goes to the only person who ever showed her kindness for help: her teacher Agnes. As soon as Quin finishes her account, Agnes asks the question that no one should ever ask a rape survivor. She asks, “How could you let this happen?” as though what happened was Quin’s fault. In the aftermath, Quin runs away to grim, drug-addled New York while Agnes spends months trying to find her. Her search fails and, at the urging of her family, goes to Italy to live with a family friend. On paper, my sympathy should be with Quin as the misunderstood rape survivor and not with the victim-blaming Agnes. What happens over the next decades, before Quin returns to confront Agnes, is what makes my sympathy switch.

It’s a curious thing how a good, well-told story can make you sympathize with people you wouldn’t expect. That’s part of the power of literature that people keep talking about. As I found my sympathies changing, I had to ask myself why. What was Gordon’s novel pushing me to think about? The aftermath of Quin’s rape and Agnes’ response had me thinking about what those two women made of them. Quin’s response was so repellent to me that I couldn’t feel for her anymore. I could intellectually understand her choices, but emotionally I couldn’t make myself sympathize with a woman who used her fame to inflict revenge on others (which Quin always calls payback) and disseminate the selfish philosophy of Ayn Rand. It was easier for me to sympathize with Agnes because her self-flagellation after her awful question resonates with me; it looks pretty similar to what I do to myself when I’ve said the wrong thing.

Nothing goes the way I would’ve expected in Payback, which is what makes it such a remarkable piece of literature. It is also probably the most honest story I’ve read about revenge. I’ve looked at some of the psychological literature on revenge—in helping literature students write about revenge stories—and was surprised-but-not-surprised to find out that getting revenge doesn’t help the revenger feel whole again. Payback is the first book I’ve read that doesn’t turn vengeance into a Shakespearean tragedy or into an audience-satisfying story of justice. This book is a brilliant antidote to what we’ve always been told about trying to get a little payback from those who’ve wronged us.

I loved some of this book but I found parts of it over-written and too dense. This is the story of two women, which began with the belief that a teacher could make up for the wrongs in a pupils’ life. These efforts and the trauma they unleashed haunted both women for the rest of their lives.

Agnes was a young and idealistic teacher in a Tony private school. It is there that she give special attention to the unloved and unlovable Heidi Stolz. It is under her guidance that Heidi takes a trip to NYC, is seduced and raped. Agnes reacts in a way that sends Heidi off, more miserable than ever, to run away.

On some level, Agnes runs away as well, and moves to Italy. Despite her successful and fulfilling life she is haunted by her words to Heidi. The book leads to a moment when Heidi has her opportunity for PAYBACK.

Although I enjoyed the storyline, I found some parts too long and boring. The minutiae about art restoration didn’t interest me. I loved the story and the main characters, but I found it hard to plow through parts of the middle which were about her craft.

As always, Gordon writes exquisitely, but I wish there was a little less of it.

Thank you Netgalley for this opportunity.