Greene (Mirror Lake; Envious Moon) has created a brilliant, harrowing novel depicting the spectacular unraveling of a once distinguished and proudly successful man. He has also conceived one of the most convincingly drawn unreliable narrators that readers may ever meet, a character recalling the creations of Edgar Allan Poe. It is nearly halfway through the novel before we begin to understand that our storyteller, Arthur Winthrop, the headmaster of the elite Lancaster School in Vermont, is delusional and psychotic-and has suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. A number of events trigger this collapse, including the loss of his son in the Iraq war and the heavy drinking that follows this tragedy. Also crucial to this breakdown is an old crime that haunts Arthur, one he committed at Lancaster as a student many years ago with the help of his father, the previous headmaster, and which involved the boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend of Arthur's. -VERDICT This is a riveting psychological novel about loss and the terrible mistakes and compromises one can make in love and marriage. Essential for fans of literary fiction.-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A man found running naked in Central Park is unusual, even by jaded New York City standards. But when that man turns out to be Arthur Winthrop, respected headmaster of Vermont's venerable Lancaster private boarding school, the event becomes noteworthy. It morphs into the surreal when Arthur eagerly confesses to police interrogators that he has just murdered one of his students, Betsy Pappas, with whom he had been conducting a torrid, if unrequited, affair. The problem with Arthur's story, however, is that his victim is very much alive. She no longer goes by the name Betsy Pappas, having relinquished it when she married Arthur soon after their college graduation. Arthur's unreliable memories of their life together fuel the sordid tale he unveils, though Elizabeth's recollection of their doomed marriage sheds an equally unflattering light on a relationship defined by jealousy, deception, and regret. Greene's genre-bending novel of madness and despair evokes both the predatory lasciviousness of Nabokov's classic, Lolita, and the anxious ambiguity of Gillian Flynn's contemporary thriller, Gone Girl (2012).--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist

Nothing is what it appears in this brilliant story of a life gone awry, in Greene's fourth novel set in New England (after 2007's Envious Moon). Arthur Winthrop, headmaster of the Vermont-based Lancaster School, is found wandering around naked in snow-covered Central Park in New York City, and as he explains to the authorities what brought him to this disturbing situation, the reader is led to believe that the book will be the story of his ill-advised affair with a female student named Betsy Pappas. But it is actually about the trajectory of Arthur's inauspicious marriage; about Betsy, a young woman trying to improve her lot; and about Arthur's family history. Greene, founder of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, ably recreates the rarified ambience of a New England private school-the awareness of social class, the faculty politics, the deference paid to the headmaster and his family. And when it becomes clear that Winthrop's delusions run far deeper than were previously apparent, the author's true intentions make this tale even more remarkable, for the book is, at its core, a trenchant examination of one family's terrible loss and how the aftermath of tragedy can make or break a person's soul. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff & Associates. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A headmaster and his wife suffer intimations of mortality on a bucolic Vermont campus. The first half of Greene's fourth novel (Envious Moon, 2007, etc.) unfolds like a conventional academic tale. The third generation head of Lancaster, an exclusive Vermont prep school, Arthur Winthrop (his father, the former head, still lives on campus) leads an orderly life, except for occasional brushes with imperious board members whose New England pedigrees are even more elite than his own. However, Arthur's marriage to Elizabeth (the couple is in their late 50s) has long since deteriorated into strained conversations and separate bedrooms. The couple was driven further apart when their only son, Ethan, opted for service in Iraq instead of college. Since Ethan's departure, Elizabeth finds solace only in obsessive tennis playing. Arthur's obsession is a student, 18-year-old Betsy Pappas, whose unconventional beauty, but most of all youth, fascinates him. He lures her to Boston on a pretext and seduces her. However, she soon tires of what she considers a training exercise with an older man and tries to disengage by dating a star basketball player, Russell Hurley, who attends Lancaster on scholarship. Arthur first tries to blackmail Betsy into continuing their affair by hiding alcohol under Russell's dorm bed but then, somewhat arbitrarily, allows disciplinary matters to take their course. Russell is expelled, and his one chance of breaking out of the working class and into the Ivy League has been dashed. Italicized interludes throughout reveal that Arthur has been picked up by NYC police after being found wandering naked in Central Park. Just as we begin to understand that this is no ordinary interrogation, the novel takes a wholly unexpected twist, which is then compounded by another, even more surprising one. Up to this point, readers will suspect only that the story could be taking place anytime in the last 40 years or so. Although the puzzle element threatens to overwhelm the narrative, this is a moving testament to the vicissitudes of love and loss, regret and hope.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.