Bye-Bye - Hardcover

Ransom, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0814774903 ISBN 13: 9780814774908

Publisher: New York University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Jane Ransom's Bye-Bye is a darkly comic first novel, both sexy and profoundly philosophical. The protagonist/narrator is a bisexual divorcee in Manhattan who assumes a false identity in an effort to escape the past and to spy on her own life. While exploring issues of gender and self, Bye-Bye deals provocatively with performance art, S&M, personal ads and art in the 90s.

About this title

About the Author

Jane Ransom is the author of Without Asking, which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and was lauded by, among others, The Village Voice and The Los Angeles Times. Ransom has lived in Madrid, Paris, and Puerto Rico, and now resides in New York.

From the Back Cover

Bye-Bye lures us into the mind of a sexually adventurous New Yorker in her mid-30s haunted by memories of her mother and of her own failed marriage. Her too-perfect husband threw her out three years before the novel opens, because of her infidelities. Partly in an effort to wrench herself out of depression, she "disappears" by changing her appearance and assuming a false identity as Rose Anne Waldin, or Rosie. Rosie boasts three lovers: two women - one an S&M pornographer, the other an aloof "Personal Ad" - and one man, whom she meets at a book-burning. The books being burned are by a celebrated Chicano poet who (an angry public has discovered) was apparently never Chicano at all. The scandal involves an elusive performance artist known only as the "Andorgenie", whose identity-bending perversities mirror Rosie's. We gradually learn about Rosie's not-at-all-rosy past, of her compulsive, often darkly comic behavior, and of her obsession with murder. Soon it grows apparent that Rosie is preparing to commit some dramatic, possibly violent, act. Poking fun at the Soho scene, Bye-Bye explores what makes art Art at the end of the millennium. And it implicitly asks, what kind of aesthetic gesture can still deliver a serious punch in a mass-media culture infatuated with sex crimes and notoriety, without degenerating into a knee-jerk defense? Bye-Bye is itself of course one answer.

Edition details

• Publisher: New York University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814774903
• ISBN 13: 9780814774908
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 198