From the Publisher

From talented newcomer Patricia Traxler comes a brilliant literary suspense novel about how desire can become jealousy, obsession, and finally murderous rage. Blood is equal parts auspicious literary debut, pageturner, and erotic novel about four people whose lives become irrevocably intertwined during one year at Radcliffe College.

The narrator, Norrie Blume, is a painter who has accepted a prestigious fellowship at the college; she's excited to leave her job as a commercial graphic designer and take up the artist's life. But she's also in the middle of an intense love affair with a married colleague, an affair that is threatening to consume both their lives. At Radcliffe, Norrie develops friendships with two other fellows, a journalist and a poet. One is deep, comforting; the other ruled by need and guilt. These three intense relationships quickly begin to infringe upon each other, and soon the four of them seem to be hurtling toward some shocking-and perhaps tragic-end.

Blood is a triumph of suspense writing, a true psychological thriller about the nature of desire and the danger of love.

Craig Holden

I have not read a book before that rendered, in quite this way, the reality of an adulterous relationship. It is quite a remarkable accomplishment.

Margot Livesey

Patricia Traxler plunges the reader into a world both familiar and eerie. Seldom have the twin obsessions of love and art been more vividly or intelligently portrayed. What an elegant, suspenseful, steamy debut.

Publishers Weekly

Blood red is the color of choice in this stylish, modishly erotic but only occasionally thrilling first novel by an award-winning poet. It's the favorite hue of painter Honora ("Norrie") Blume, who at 36 wins a Larkin Fellowship at Radcliffe in Cambridge, Mass., and it dominates her sex life as well: from the steamy dreams she has about her married novelist lover, Michael, to the horrifying miscarriage of his child. Unfortunately, red is also the color of a gigantic herring, which Traxler drags onstage early in the book in the persona of a disturbed Chilean journalist named Clara Brava. This demanding, jealous young woman quickly becomes the friend/neighbor from hell especially when Norrie is much more successful than her at making friends with Clara's idol, an Indian poet named Devi Bhujander. So when Devi is stabbed to death outside of the college-owned apartment building where all three women live, Clara is immediately suspected to be the killer. Having softened us up by creating Clara as the perfect monster, it would have been much more dramatically satisfying if Traxler had showed other possible murderers. She does but it's a ponderous (and finally hard to swallow) effort, with too much time spent discussing whether lover Michael will actually leave his tedious wife. There are some lovely poetic images ("I felt a bloat of grief") and some interesting secondary characters (especially an old woman dying in a nursing home, with whom Norrie has a strong bond based on a failed love affair with her dead son), but in the end the book conveys the thick and clotted feeling of too much emotion and not enough thought. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The title of this first novel by poet Traxler (Forbidden Words) refers not only to a murder but also to passion and to the paint used by artist Honora Blume, the novel's central character. Honora's intense secret involvement with a married man, a newly successful writer, suffuses her year as a fellow at Radcliffe's Larkin Institute. Traxler believably renders her character's creativity, both when Honora is unable to paint and when she ably expresses her ideas on her canvases, which are dominated by female nudes and varied reds. During her Larkin year, Honora balances painting, involvement with other "Larkies," a highly erotic relationship with her lover, and the murder of a friend. The homicide is solved mostly offstage, though the fear it generates is ever present. Traxler's language and her especially vivid descriptions benefit from her poetic abilities, while her plot and character development are also strong; a sense of loss and the quest for self-knowledge are as present here as in her poetry. Recommended for extensive mystery and contemporary fiction collections. Ruth H. Miller, Univ. of Southern Indiana Lib., Evansville, IN Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Poet and storyteller Traxler packs the heroine of her first novel off to Cambridge for a fellowship whose turbulent course will be anything but academic. All her life, from her childhood with her widowed mother in Santa Monica to her work as the head of the Aperçu Press's design department, Honora Blume's painting has taken a backseat to something else. Now that she's approaching midlife, her yearlong appointment as a Larkin fellow at Radcliffe has finally made it possible for her to spend the days at the Larkin center with other gifted women and her nights in her Brattle Street apartment painting. For better or worse, she'll also be close to Michael Sullivan, a rising author for whose novel she provided the cover illustration-and with whom she's been carrying on a secret romance for over a year. Norrie's continuing affair with Michael, who insists that he's going to tell his investment-banker wife of 25 years that he's leaving her and their two teenaged children as soon as the time is right, offers both inspiration for and distraction from her painting, which Traxler details with darkly glowing precision. But despite her passionate, imaginatively varied interludes with Michael-presented in equally absorbing detail-it's her Larkin neighbors in Brattle Street, especially Chilean journalist Clara Brava and Nobel Prize nominee Devi Bhujander, who'll have the decisive impact on her. Early hints of violent death to come insure a frisson whenever there's a rustling at the door, and Norrie wonders whether it's the men responsible for a rash of burglaries or the clinging-vine Clara, who may be even more dangerous. For all these dire portents, Traxler conscientiously prevents the hints offull-throated melodrama from ever taking flight. Her deeper evocation of the ecstatic waking nightmare of love, friendship, and artistic creation, however, rings true to the end.

What People Are Saying

Craig Holden
I have not read a book before that rendered, in quite this way, the reality of an adulterous relationship. It is quite a remarkable accomplishment.
— (Craig Holden, author of Four Corners of Night)

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read a Sample Chapter

Interviews & Essays

Twice in the last decade, killing -- actual murder, not the motif of the procedural or whodunit -- has touched my life. In the first incident, a brilliant and beautiful academic colleague of mine was slashed to death on a city street in what police termed a crime of "overkill." Her purse was found undisturbed nearby, seeming to indicate that robbery was not a motive and leading many to theorize that the killer may have known the victim. This murder was never solved.

Then, five years ago, there was a Manson-style multiple murder in the quiet midwestern neighborhood I was living in, so close to my house that police were searching for the weapon in my yard. In this crime, as in the other, some great rage seemed to underlie the act, and even though this case was ultimately solved and robbery deemed part of the motive, the source of the killer's rage remained inexplicable to everyone, including the police.

Again and again I've tried to imagine what might be at the roots of such crimes -- obsession, passion, jealousy, lunacy, some real or imagined injustice or breach of faith. Gradually a story -- quite unrelated to either actual event -- began forming in my mind, and an invented cast of characters began to develop. This kind of imagining may be the writer's compulsion or the writer's curse. It's odd how one or more real-life incidents can provide the seed of an idea for a story that ultimately bears no likeness to any actual event. The one aspect of both murders that I tried to re-create was the paralyzing fear any community -- especially a small one -- feels in the aftermath of such mayhem. In this heightened emotional atmosphere, Blood examines such themes as erotic love, artistic obsession, and female friendship.

I like to think I'm a relatively balanced person, so it's a little unsettling to recall how during the period of writing the book, my own relationship to the act of writing came to resemble the obsessiveness of the characters I was developing. For a year I wrote 7 days a week, from 8 to 20 hours a day, occasionally going off to my day job without having slept at all the night before. I felt restless and uneasy whenever I wasn't at work on the book; I brought backup diskettes with me wherever I went -- even to dinner or the movies -- just in case the house should burn down while I was out! While writing I forgot to eat; my husband, Patrick, would bring me sandwiches or bowls of oatmeal. My dog, Walker, would sit beneath the desk and watch me sadly. Writing Blood gave me (and them, no doubt) a new and personal perspective on obsession. (Patricia Traxler)

Reading Group Guide

From talented newcomer Patricia Traxler comes a brilliant literary suspense novel about how desire can become jealousy, obsession, and finally murderous rage. Blood is equal parts auspicious literary debut, page-turner, and erotic novel about four people whose lives become irrevocably intertwined during one year at Radcliffe College.

The narrator, Norrie Blume, is a painter who has accepted a prestigious fellowship at the college; she's excited to leave her job as a commercial graphic designer and take up the artist's life. But she's also in the middle of an intense love affair with a married colleague, an affair that is threatening to consume both their lives. At Radcliffe, Norrie develops friendships with two other fellows, a journalist and a poet. One is deep, comforting; the other ruled by need and guilt. These three intense relationships quickly begin to infringe upon each other, and soon the four of them seem to be hurtling toward some shocking-and perhaps tragic-end.

Blood is a triumph of suspense writing, a true psychological thriller about the nature of desire and the danger of love.

Discussion Questions:

Discuss the color red and how it works throughout the book --- the red vase, the red blood, the red paint, the red wine. There are references to the smell of blood and the taste of it. What does red symbolize to Norrie? What does it symbolize to Devi?

Knowing how Norrie felt about her father's affair, why do you think she went ahead and had an affair with Michael? Do you think Michael ever planned to leave his wife for Norrie? Were you surprised when Norrie's mother confessed her understanding for her father's "intimacies?"

Traxler writes what it is like to be the "'other woman', a term that makes clear that no matter how real the love, you're a spare --- like a summer house in the Hamptons or the shoes he saves for formal occasions; something he doesn't actually live with, but which he keeps just outisde his field of vision, his real life, in case he should need it." (page 2) Do you agree with her interpretation?

Discuss blood as a metaphor in this book. Norrie has creativity in her blood. Blood flows when Norrie has sex with Michael and again when she loses the baby. When Devi is murdered there is blood. Is blood a symbol of something here? Is it passion? Is it loss?

What does painting mean for Norrie? She paints with great vigor when Michael is gone. How is her painting and her feeling about painting similar to or dependent on her feelings for Michael? "I kept painting though I knew what I saw on the canvas was not my best work, wasn't even really good, but I kept going all night, and if it was lousy this time I didn't care, it didn't matter, this was what I wanted, what I needed to do, and I had to have it, I was greedy for it the way I was greedy for Michael's body, but I did not have to covet this, for it was already mine, it was mine." (page 53)

Before each chapter there is text written in italics that tells its own story. Did you think these passages enhanced the story, or took away from it? Why do you think the author chose to include them?

Why do you think that Norrie chose to confide in Devi about Michael, but not Liz? Did she feel safer telling Devi? Why do you think that she look so long to tell Liz about Michael?

Look at the concept of friendship. Norrie had very different friendships with the women in her life --- Liz, Devi, Clara, Ida. Contrast these with her relationships with her relationships with men.

Talk about jealousy and its impact on this story: The depths of Clara's jealousy. The jealousy of Paul Monnard. The jealousy of Norrie for Brenda and the life she has with Michael.

Who did you suspect killed Devi before the killer was revealed? What clues did you see to back up your suspicion? Discuss each person's motives. How did the author keep the suspense going throughout the book?

The author, Patricia Traxler, is an award-winning poet. Do you see poetic influences in her writing that you are not accustomed to seeing in typical suspense writing?

About the Author:

Patricia Traxler was born in California and now lives in Kansas. An award-winning poet, she has published three volumes of poetry, and her fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as The Boston Review, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, Slate, and Ms. magazine. This is her first novel.

Read a Sample Chapter

Blood

---

By Patricia Traxler

Minotaur Books

Copyright © 2001 Patricia Traxler.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 031227484X

---

Prologue

Though it's true there's a killing in my story, its principal violence is, I think I'd have to say, the violence of love. And even after all that's happened, I don't begin to know what love is—only what it does. When I have it in my life, I live with it gratefully but warily, the way I live with electricity or wind. That is, I can't comprehend electricity, but I know it has the power to kill, or to light a room; I don't understand the origins of wind, but I've seen how it can ravage the landscape, and have also felt the voluptuous relief of it on hot August days.

I was a late arrival to love—maybe because painting filled my imagination and used me up, and I wasn't particularly aware of any void in my life. For a long time I saw sex mostly as fleeting pleasure. After a decade of empty dalliances in my twenties, a couple years of celibacy, and two brief live-in relationships that expected too much, I fell in love for the first time when I was thirty-four, really in love—with a married man. It was only then that love presented itself in all its unruly splendor.

Once love happens, sex feels like a sacrament—even when it could be called adulterous by the Church. Or your mother.

My mother was a strict Irish Catholic, an old-fashioned woman who quit teaching when she married, to become what people used to call a "homemaker." My late father was her polar opposite—Jewish intellectual, a psychiatrist who agreed with Freud that religion is "an illusion." I can't imagine what brought the two of them together. I pray it wasn't sex—I've got enough of my mother in me that I really don't like to think of anyone's mother having sex. Mother provided my sex education in one anecdote: She told me she'd made my father kneel down beside the bed and pray with her on their wedding night before she would "consummate the marriage." Daddy was an athiest, but apparently he knew where his bread was buttered because nine months later I was born.

Obviously, sex is a mysterious force. Until Michael, I don't think I had a clue about the real power of erotic desire. With him I learned that you can disappear there, can lose yourself in the wilderness of mutual skin, and before you know it, your world has lost its shape and its boundaries. All that matters is the next touch.

I often had to wait for that, though, because now I was what people like to call the "other woman," a term that makes clear that no matter how real the love, you're a spare—like a summer house in the Hamptons or the shoes he saves for formal occasions; something he doesn't actually live with, but which he keeps just outside his field of vision, his real life, in case he should need it.

In that state two perfectly nice people can turn a world inside out and scarcely notice. At some point they may look around the ruined landscape and find they can't quite orient themselves to what they've made. The married party has another life and goes back to it after each assignation; the unmarried one becomes more and more solitary, spends too many free hours waiting for the married lover to appear. People speak of adultery as a double life, and I found it did add up to two lives: Michael had a life and a half to deal with; I had half a life. Even with the demands and pleasures of work, it began to seem as if the meaning of my existence could be summed up in one question: When will I see you again? It's not encouraging to realize your life's meaning has been reduced to the title of a bad song from your early dating years.

I'd show up at art openings and social functions alone, and when friends tried to fix me up with available men (often, oddly, with the words, "He's a big teddy bear," or, "He's a bear of a man," as if I were looking for someone to hibernate with), I'd turn them down with vague explanations. I couldn't tell them the truth: I'd promised Michael I would talk to no one about us until he'd found a way to tell his wife he wanted to leave the marriage.

It didn't take long for me to see how, caught outside the flow of ordinary life, a person can end up inhabiting a false universe. In time, as I became increasingly distant from my friends, that universe began to seem real, and it was hard to remember that I was only a viewer of Michael's world, not a participant in it. I knew every drama in the lives of his two kids, Finnian and Bridget—their problems and triumphs at school, their growing pains, every detail of the Thanksgiving when eleven-year-old Bridget unexpectedly got her first period at the dinner table and thought she was bleeding to death, and later that same evening when sixteen-year-old Finn showed up with a pierced tongue and announced over pumpkin pie that he was "primarily hetero" but considering his "sexual options." I fretted with Michael when Bridget refused to leave the house till the bleeding stopped five days later; I gloried in Finn's first poetry publication in a campus literary journal; I knew their lives as intimately as if they were my family, yet they didn't know I existed.

I remember sitting alone in the living room of my Cambridge apartment high above Brattle Street one night that fall thinking Winter's coming, and I didn't mean only the weather. The moon was big. I heard my own whisper leaping out into the room, I want to go home, as if the words had formed independent of me, frost on a windowpane, a chill. I want to go home.

All my life I've heard those words in my head, and I know I'll hear them till I die, no matter where I am. I've no idea where home is. But the words are always in my mind, except when I paint—they're what sends me to the canvas in the first place because they fuel that need, the hunger that ultimately feeds me, makes me know I'm alive. Alive and impermanent—the awareness of finitude is important there—it gives desire the edge of necessity.

I want to go home. The words sang in my blood, pumped through it each time I fucked Michael, I want to go home, and I climbed him like a ladder, fervid, hungry to reach the top, to know everything, every cell of him, to have it, have it, I want to go home, and the explosion then, that strange ecstatic apogee of having, the settling of the pulse into the air of the moment, that brief harmony of need and knowing, a perfect clarity, home.

Then the calm rolls in like fog, and nothing in the room, in your life, has edges. You think right then you might want it to last forever.

Lucky it doesn't. If that calm were a lasting state, no one would paint or write, design a skyscraper, or build a bridge. Erotic torpor. It's a killer. Sometimes when I was with Michael the words would go away for days at a time. Without them, I didn't paint, didn't need to.

And then he'd leave me to go back to his real life, and I would lock myself away with the words and the paint, and desire would reconstitute itself. Everything began to be red in those days, blood reds shading into odd reds I'd never seen. I think infinite shades of red must exist that I've still not seen. For a long time I tried to locate more and more of them in my palette. I filled canvas after canvas with unnamed reds, the reds of my longing and anger, of need and grief and jealousy. But the hardest reds to look at were the clear, sudden reds of knowing.

When I was a kid in Catholic school, we were told that in taking the sacrament of Holy Eucharist, we were eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. I was so young when I learned about it—six years old—that it never seemed extraordinary to me, the idea that Jesus would want us to take him into our own skins that way, corporeally whole and entire, in order that he could take up residence, as the nuns told us, "in our hearts."

"That's how great is His love for us," Sister Mary Agnes would say.

Sometimes I wonder if I've taken my idea of romantic love from that early catechism lesson. Probably because I'm a painter, I tend to cast abstractions into visual images—it's how I understand them best. And the way I imagine it, desire rides on the blood, follows it through our veins and arteries to the heart, and when it finds its way at last into that soft chamber, it takes up residence there. Sometimes it can't get out again.

I'd like to understand such longing better. I've come closer to comprehending it in my painting than in my life, but for the most part it's remained a mystery to me. Still, I feel Ican't give up till I've found my way to some kind of clear and solid truth about the desire love fuels, that longing beyond mere arousal and more than just of the flesh.

If I could do that, sometimes I think it's possible I'd learn to trust it again.

Then I think of the events on Brattle Street and remember it was disappointed desire, distorted desire, that turned all the world the color of blood, and I have to wonder if anyone could ever be safe in such a wilderness.

Is it strange then for me to say that even considering its capacity for damage, I believe love should never be regretted? I do believe that. Regret is unbecoming. It's a way of not taking responsibility for what you've done.

Long ago I read about how Edith Piaf, "the Little Sparrow" of Paris, climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower late one night and sang out over the streets of the city, in her unforgettable voice, the song, “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.”

I'd like to be that way, regretting nothing. I'm aiming for that.

A late night motor trip in early childhood—my mother asleep in the front passenger seat, and I, probably four years old, in the backseat awakening to the bluish lights of a nighttime freeway in Northern California, the passing flash and roar of each oncoming car, the sight of my father's hands on the steering wheel, the springy black hairs on his lean wrists, the tensile strength in his fingers as he steers, moving us through the night toward our destination.

Looking back, I believe this was a foreshadowing of adult female longing, a kind of desire, though even now I can't say for what exactly since I knew nothing yet about the things men and women do together. I only know I couldn't take my eyes off my father's hands. My mother was asleep, which meant that I was alone with him in the tiny, rolling universe of our family car, alone with him in the grown-up world for the first time. I didn't need to speak, and I didn't. It didn't matter that he was unaware of my wakeful presence there in the seat behind him. All that mattered in that moment was that my father was carrying us skillfully through the darkened world to wherever it was we were going, and that I was seeing his hands and wrists, really seeing them for the first time and they were beautiful to me, they were telling me something about what a man is and something about me—and I was caught there speechless, in love, my eyes wide open in the dark.

---

Excerpted from Blood by Patricia Traxler. Copyright © 2001 by Patricia Traxler. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

---