BookView Review

Hayes’s latest novel is an ambitious, unsettling exploration of how power, faith, and sexuality intersect—and how private trauma can metastasize into a worldview that seeks to explain the world itself. When Mary Armstrong, the daughter of a prominent U.S. senator, dies in a car accident, her childhood friend is given access to her lifelong diary and undertakes the task of shaping its fragmented, undated entries into a coherent narrative. 

At the heart of the novel is Mary’s attempt to make sense of a childhood marked by betrayal and taboo. Hayes places Mary’s personal trauma within a broad intellectual framework, drawing on theology, ancient religion, psychoanalysis, linguistics, opera, and Western political history to link sexual repression with religious dogma, racism, and violence. These elements are integral to Mary’s worldview, collapsing the sacred and the erotic, the personal and the political, into a narrative that reads as a philosophical argument rendered through story.

The prose is dense and essayistic, at times deliberately excessive, reflecting the mind of a protagonist who cannot stop thinking, connecting, or interrogating. Readers accustomed to streamlined plotting may find the book demanding, but Hayes’s control of tone and voice keeps the narrative from dissolving into abstraction. He takes considerable thematic risks, engaging directly with incest, religious extremism, racism, and antisemitism, and offers no redemptive resolution. The result is a demanding but powerful story that will appeal to readers drawn to intellectually rigorous literary fiction.

A disturbing, memorable, and fiercely original experience.

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