Starred review from March 1, 2025
A ghost town in the Rockies has been turned into a shabby movie set in 1975, where Murphy's sharply observant, lyrically inclined narrator, an actor adjusting to turning 40, reflects on her life. Through Barbara's memories and musings, Murphy, in a radical shift from her previous novel, Talking Animals (2020), incisively considers the shifting aesthetics of moviemaking and gradations of misogyny in the wake of the Manhattan Project (for which Barbara's engineer father worked), the atomic bomb itself ("Once it was dropped, it never stopped mushrooming."), JFK's assassination, and the Vietnam War. Barbara is haunted by her lovely, traumatized mother, who died by suicide when Barbara was 13, and her father's indifference. She flees the desert for the effervescence of New York, working an office job, learning to deploy her beauty, and taking acting classes. A summer stock gig leads to her first trip to Europe to shoot her first film, an intense, avant-garde take on the life of Saint Barbara. Her enduring love for daring director Lev brings luxury and anguish. Restless and inquisitive, Barbara is acutely sensitive to time, irony, the zeitgeist, metaphorical dimensions of filmmaking and nuclear physics, and power dynamics personal and professional. Murphy's atmospheric, Didionesque portrait of a creatively brilliant and cruelly underestimated "permanent outsider" is exquisitely perceptive and lushly resonant.
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