In the Cut

by Susanna Moore

Living alone in New York, Frannie teaches creative writing to a motley bunch of students, and secretly compiles a dictionary of street slang: virginia, n., vagina; snapper, n., vagina; brasole, n., vagina. One evening at a bar, she stumbles upon a man, his face in shadow, a tattoon on his wrist, a woman kneeling between his legs. A week later a detective shows up at her door. The woman's body has been discovered in the park across the street. Soon Frannie is propelled into a sexual liaison that tests the limits of her safety and desires, as she begins a terrifying descent into the dark places that reside deep within her.

Genres: Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Crime, Mystery Thriller, Suspense, Erotica

192 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels One Last Look, In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, was published by the National Geographic Society in 2003. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

“‘A broad wants me to be one way, wants something from me, I can do it, I told you that already, just with you, it’s different. I feel like I’m running all the time. Running just to stay even.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I was furious.

‘You didn’t do nothing.’

‘I know. I’m sorry that you feel that way.’

He nodded. Softening. ‘You’re not easy.’

‘Why would you want me to be?’

He shrugged. ‘You know what’s wrong with you? You know your worth. You know just how much you’re worth.’

‘And that’s why I’m not easy?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Yeah.’ He paused, as if I really wanted him to come up with a right word. ‘Yeah.’”

I think we have all taken a wrong turn while looking for a bathroom in a bar in a serpentine building and discovered with mild anxiety that we were lost. Most of us don’t come across a gorgeous redhead giving fellatio to a man in the shadows, but that is exactly what happens to Frannie Thorstin. Do you leave? Do you stay? Clear your throat and ask...excuse me, where is the bathroom?

The man notices Frannie watching. He doesn’t care. If anything, it makes him lose his nut faster.

Frannie teaches English to a misfit group of young adults, one of whom has dragged her into this bar. ”Cornelius was having trouble with irony.” Her hobby, maybe it will turn into a book, is compiling a list of street vernacular. Words that have been appropriated for new uses, or new words that have been created whole cloth to fit the evolving changes on the New York street. Virginia, Snapper, Brasole, Gash-hound—all slang terms involving the vagina. Gangster lean...the cool way to sit in the driver’s seat of a car. Chronic...drug addict. Dixie cup...a person considered to be disposable. The street creates its own language, like lawyers, doctors, and psychologists. She is the chronicler. A person on safari, unaware that the lions and tigers and hippopotamuses can come too close.

Detective James A. Malloy comes by her apartment to ask some questions. The bartender gave up her name. The redhead has been found with her throat slit and her body disarticulated.

She runs the word around her tongue. It’s a good one.

Did she see anything?

Frannie saw something. More than she is willing to tell. She saw a tattoo, a distinctive one. The same one that Malloy has.

Is he the killer?

Does she care?

She’s hot for Malloy. ”It would have been my third or sixth or tenth mistake. I’d stopped counting.” It was like having the street right in her bed, right in her cut. She likes him for all the wrong reasons. She lusts for him for even worse reasons. He is her deep-cover, research project...a barbarian within the gates.

It’s like everyone is watching her, stalking her, weighing her. She is more alive than she has ever been and never been closer to death. What is really going on, and who does the killer want next?

The sex scenes are raw and explicit, but also central to the plot, and add to the overall uneasiness that the reader feels as the suspense ratchets upward. We are aghast at the chances Frannie takes and wonder if she is trying to live on the edge or looking for a push off the ledge. I love Susanna Moore’s writing style for this book. It’s cut so lean it shows the bone. This is a literary novel with splashes of gritty prose that could have been written by authors like Fredric Brown, Cornell Woolrich, and Jim Thompson. This novel reeks of blood, spit, semen, and sweat. The plot is going to be too real for many people because Moore is going to push your sensibilities right to the breaking point, but there are truths revealed in this novel where other authors fear to tread. Jane Champion directed the 2003 movie based on the book, starring Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and she keeps the movie true to the book. We all tremble for Frannie.

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[Delee · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began.
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

After finishing IN THE CUT- I set it down and thought for a moment...Did that really happen? I picked it up again and re-read the final pages...Yes, yes, it really did. I should have known...there were many clues given- I felt like I had been punched in the gut, and that feeling lingered over the next couple of days. This story will stay with me for a very looooooong time.



Frannie Thorstin- the novel's narrator- is a divorced 35 year-old, living in New York City. She teaches a creative writing course at NYU, and is writing a book on dialects and idiomatic language. For the most part Frannie prefers her own company to others- with one exception- Pauline- her best friend, who she thinks of as family.



The story begins in a bar called- The Red Turtle- a seedy place that is a favorite spot for both cops and criminals. Cornelius Webb- Frannie's student- is giving her insight into "street slang" for her book and has asked to meet. When Frannie goes in search of the washrooms downstairs- she ends up witnessing a sexual act between an unknown red-haired woman and a man whose face is concealed in shadow- a tattoo of the three of spades on his wrist.

Soon after Detective James Malloy comes a calling- and Frannie is both instantly attracted and disturbed by the encounter. Malloy informs her of a murder that she may know something about- The savage murder of a red-haired woman who hung out at The Red Turtle. And although Frannie is shaken she keeps quiet about what she saw on the night she was there-especially after noticing Malloy's tattoo.



Although Frannie knows she shouldn't-she starts a sexual relationship with Detective Malloy and plunges into a dark unfamiliar world very different from the one she is used to.

Come at last to this point
I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark

IN THE CUT is beautiful and unsettling, ugly and disturbing. There is poetry, sex, cruel and brutal men aplenty, and an ending that will haunt your dreams.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw the much maligned and panned 2003 film adaptation of this novel, and I came across it on a whim perusing at the library.

Upon opening the pages of the novel, it is a deeply poetic and unsettling novel about English teacher Frannie's sexual discovery and odyssey amidst gruesome murders set in Lower Manhattan during the mid 1990s. She finds herself attracted to the gruff and sexy Molloy, a cop with a checkered past, and dreamily thinks of love with her sister Pauline.

Moore's language is cutting, sexy and reminiscent of Hemingway and Carver's spare prose; at once revealing itself to be a woman's sexual journey towards a devastating and haunting finale.

As someone who's dabbled in writing, I believe she is a master stylist.

Postscript (2023): I saw the film again at a screening in which the topic was "Women living in peril in New York". I am glad to see that critics now see it as one of Jane Campion's underrated best. It's treatment of desire and loneliness is one of the most intimate seen on screen.

Meg Ryan's performance being slaughtered by male critics came from misogyny, and it's sad that it wasn't appreciated. She's internal, curious, and fascinated by Mark Ruffalo's sleazy Molloy who is gorgeously naked: body hair and all of his middle parts- so gloriously sexy, objectified for all the ladies and gay men.

Jennifer Jason Leigh's Pauline is also a revelation. She becomes the center of the film, representing all of the romantic possibilities that yearning and violence can be for both Frannie and Molloy.

It's a deeply unsettling look at New York City post 9-11, and one of Campion's most beguiling movies.

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the Cut was made into a movie just a scant few years ago by artsy feminist director Jane Campion, with Meg Ryan the all-American girl trying to pull the mid-life star comeback and the sexy image-changing turn (with Oscar-bait glum acting chops and the requisite nudity) in the role of the language scholar and teacher who succumbs to the pull of the seamy side of NYC. Shades of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, perhaps.

The book, in a nutshell, is about a divorced English teacher in New York, (Frannie in the film but unnamed in the book; I'll stick with Frannie for ID purposes), whose days involve contending with half-illiterate students and whose nights seem a bit dowdy until she sees a sexual act in a bar that ends up making her a potential witness in a murder case. She finds herself being visited rather too frequently by a rough-hewn police detective, Malloy, whose crudity fascinates her, but who also may be leading her into greater danger.

After reading this, I think the material actually works better in film form. I like the film, but it, like this book, suffers from a kind of schizophrenia. It seems that half the time author Susanna Moore is more interested in exploring arcana such as linguistics (her character is contantly pondering and musing over various types of argot), student-teacher relations, school politics, social class distinctions and the place of the intelligent working gal and her conflicting sexual feelings in the milieu of postmodern urban alienation. Blah blah. In the doing so, the crime story of the book gets elongated almost to the point of nonexistence for most of the narrative. (Frannie as narrator--ergo Susanna Moore--admits more than once that she can't stick to the point.)

The book is filled with interminable tangents and digressions that sap the gravitas from a shocking (though not entirely unexpected) ending that should be powerful, but isn't due to reader lack of interest by that point. The dialogues between Frannie and her friend John are incredibly boring (and sometimes nonsensical, or just badly written) and the doings in the police precinct HQ are listless. And I don't understand all the broohaha here among reviewers about the allegedly saucy sex scenes. They don't seem particularly unique to me. Maybe I'm jaded.

The upshot is that readers who dig crime fiction are not going to like this very much as a crime thriller, and also means that readers interested in philosophical character studies are going to be annoyed that there is any crime plot at all, especially as it gains momentum again near the finale.

Watching the film, I liked all the stuff about the milieu of dark New York and the sensuous urges of the heroine, but was put out when the cheesy crime-plot elements intruded (in fact, the movie radically changes the ending to an unlikely happy one, but that's Hollywood, folks). Reading the book, I appreciated its consideration of issues of female control and sexuality, and a woman's observations about male sexual behavior (even when they were sometimes stereotypical).

Given the thematic ambitions of the book, I'm not sure if Moore really wanted to write a crime book, or felt that doing so would give it commercial legs. The only really useful thing about the crime plot is that it introduces an element of risk and danger that plays on the conflicting urges of the heroine to be safe and bookish versus daring and sensual.

The book has moments of bravura writing, but seems at times also to need tighter editing. I sometimes felt that Moore had written lots of notes about people's speech patterns with the intention of shoe-horning them into a novel narrative, which at times is how the thing feels while reading it. (Yes, I realize Frannie is supposed to be writing a dictionary about contemporary slang, but the asides in which she shares some of its contents feel like an intrusion. You just want her to get on with the story already.)

The book was interesting enough to continue reading, and there were passages where I was thinking, "Why can't she write the rest of this book this well?" Perhaps I was put off somewhat by Frannie's air of condescension throughout; it often made it hard for me to take her and the issues in the book seriously.

There's a really good novel hiding in this mess. It strives, but fails, to find the Platonic form it seeks.

I'd recommend the movie (I think one version of the movie on DVD may offer the "alternate" original downbeat ending) but advise passing on this book, with so many other good reads out there.


(Kr@KY, reposted 2016)

[Linda Strong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frannie is a school teacher ... instructing students on how to write. She has a love of words and language. She's making notes in order to someday write a book ... right now she's concentrating on street slang.

One evening she's in a local bar headed for the basement ladies room. She accidentally walks in on a man and a woman during an intimate moment. His face is in the shadows. but she remembers well the tattoo on his wrist. The woman is young, with red hair.

Homicide detectives show up asking questions about the latest woman to be murdered in her neighborhood. From there, she enters into an explicitly intimate relationship with one of the detectives ... who has a tattoo on his wrist.

This book is not for the faint of heart. It's raw, it's dark, it's gritty. The intimate times are graphic and vivid. Nothing is hidden from the reader. Language is harsh and unrelenting.

IN THE CUT is a well written erotica thriller, with psychological overtones, along with characters and events that literally will have you checking the doors and windows .... and if you are a woman, will have you taking a second or third look at the men in your lives.

The ending is sensational ... never saw it coming.

[Ken · Rating 1 out of 5]

In The Cut was a quick read. It kept me turning the pages, wanting to know what would happen. The main character intrigued me at first. And that's about as close as I can get to praise for this book.

If you can stomach gruesome, twisted violence and enjoy analyzing it on a symbolic or literary level, then you may appreciate this book more than I. I don't think this book had anywhere near enough to say, however, to justify its sickening level of brutality.

At its heart, this is a mediocre whodunit. A good mystery of this type gives us several plausible suspects, each with motive, each keeping us guessing. I guess that Susanna Moore wasn't up to the task, so instead she gives us red herrings: clues that mean nothing; characters who are under suspicion simply because they always seem to be showing up for no good reason; a revelation at the end that is disappointing in its lack of connection to what the reader already knows.

Moore apparently sees nothing good in female sexuality. It seems to me that she is portraying women as victims of their own "uncontrollable" urges, blinded by sex. Weak because of it. That's a sad perspective to take.

I don't mind violence in a book or movie when it serves a purpose. Instead, here, it is both the means and the end.

Again, I'm sure that some readers will get off on analyzing this book in terms of symbols -- the narrator symbolizes "this"; her use of language tells us "that" about the human condition. But the main character, who starts off so refreshingly different, never gets fully developed. The other characters are caricatures, there only to play out their role. As someone who prefers to read about people rather than mere cyphers, and who doesn't appreciate graphic violence without a strong story to support it, In The Cut doesn't make the cut.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that was certainly... about 180 pages.

Moore's narrator is a creative writing instructor working for a program that specializes in talented, disadvantaged students; she's also writing a book on linguistics, specifically on slang, so she spends the novel collecting words. It suits her--she's acquisitive, curious. She wants access and understanding, but she's there to analyze and obsess, not judge.

Despite her apparently sedate career, she winds up getting involved in a string of brutal murders: while at a bar with a student (already a violation of boundaries, so the book shows you early on how she lets the lines get blurred), she goes looking for the bathroom and stumbles in on a man getting a blowjob. She's hypnotized by it, especially since the position means that she and the man can see each other--though she can't get a good look at his face--but the woman doesn't know she's there. Something about the man's vibe appeals to her. She notices a particular tattoo on his wrist.

The woman giving the blowjob then turns up murdered, and the cop who shows up to ask the narrator questions about it has that tattoo on his wrist. Now, it would occur to me, to you, and I suspect to anyone, that this brings with it a whole host of concerns, but Moore's narrator focuses entirely on the cop's role in the blowjob and not at all on his possible role in the murder. She falls into an erotic obsession with him and they have an awkward, earthy, very explicit affair, while she's swimmy-headed with lust and the reader doesn't know who to trust.

This is a hard one to review because for much of its length, I wasn't really enjoying it. I really admire the way Moore writes about sex and her narrator's obsessive desire for this particular man--this is a surprisingly difficult thing to pull off and I can think of multiple writers, all very good, who haven't exactly managed it. Moore nails the way the way the pull between the characters is physical in the sense of being rooted in specific details but also the way attraction goes beyond notions of beauty and into something more electric and harder to define. The sexual thrill and danger work together very well.

But for the longest time, nothing else about the novel hangs together for me. Partly that's because Moore's story is partly about being driven by impulse, so characters are constantly making decisions that seem poorly motivated; it works thematically but is nonetheless annoying. But also Moore pushes the dark appeal so far that everything in the novel just seems grimy and incredibly weird, as if the whole world has been pulled into the narrator's vortex of sex and slime. Realism slips casually into surrealism and just plain WTF. Some samples:

"Cops go through girlfriends like they go through veal cutlets."--That's the comparison you reach for? I don't even remember the last time I ate a veal cutlet, so I can't even get a good fix on this. Are cops notorious for eating a lot of veal cutlets? Can they afford that on their salaries? Surely beef is cheaper.

"Can you imagine him going into Cartier and ordering it? It's not as if they have charms for the termination of pregnancy in the display case. Well, perhaps now they do, but they didn't have them in 1956. The charms would have been made especially for him."--We're talking here, for the record, about a golden Cartier charm bracelet, a family heirloom the narrator's friend passes onto her: the charms are a tiny baby carriage, a telegram, a gold toilet, a kind of poultry bulb-baster, and a cocktail shaker that unscrews and turns out to hold a tiny golden baby. I mean, this is at least supposed to be weird in the text, but I feel like if I ever encountered something this weird, it would be all I talked about for the next three days.

But the all-time winner is the following offhanded reference: I, who refused for years to let the husband in Paris realize his life's ambition of photographing a scorpion in my vagina.

Yeah. AS WOULD I.

So--well-handled simmering eroticism, intentionally vulgar and well-done sex scenes, a good grasp on the entanglement of sex and danger, and a Highsmith-like take on instability and narcissism, all good; scorpions in vaginas, bad, inability to persistently see the characters as human beings, also bad. But then the last, say, two pages of the novel are such a bravura conclusion, horrifying and exultant, that it permanently colors how I see the book and almost makes me want to bump this up to four stars. It's the kind of book you might, therefore, enjoy more in retrospect than you enjoy while you're actually reading it. Which isn't a bad deal--it's less than two hundred pages, so it won't take you long to read, but you'll have the rest of your life to be puzzled and traumatized by it.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

After finishing Susanna Moore's In the Cut, I was left thinking: Wow. She WENT there. She did THAT. Susanna Moore does not hold back. This disturbing, intelligent, and startling novel is my favorite book that I've read this year. It came out in '95 but it explores a lot of issues that are remarkably relevant today.

Frannie, a teacher in New York City, is at a bar with one of her students one day when she sees a woman performing a sex act on a man in the bar's shadowy basement. She finds herself unable to look away. Shortly thereafter, she learns that the woman she saw was brutally murdered. Frannie becomes caught up in the investigation when she's questioned by Detective Malloy, a man she's instantly drawn to. As they begin a heady sexual relationship, it becomes clear that there may be a serial killer on the loose. And Frannie's carefully calibrated world begins to spiral out of control.

This book is hot! This book is vicious! In other words, it's an erotic thriller. But it's so much more than that. It's very literary. Frannie is a linguist. It's on brand that I would love a book about language so much when as a kid I wrote random words I loved in the margins of all my notes at school. Frannie is similarly obsessed with language, even making asides about something being a good word. She makes slang her study, and it's interesting to see which phrases are still popular, which are obsolete, and which ones I've never heard of. This is a book for people who love language.

In the Cut is gripping right away. It gets right into it. I love the voice. It's funny. It's fast paced and a quick read. The plotting is so good! *chef's kiss* #bellisima Moore lays breadcrumbs you will only see in hindsight because she pulls off the magician's trick of concealing them all until the eleventh hour.

This novel feels like an honest depiction of the unsavory and toxic aspects of life and society. The main characters’ biases and prejudices are on full display, and Moore doesn't sugarcoat anything to make them more sympathetic or likable. Instead she bears witness to the kind of casual racism that is rampant in America. Frannie thinks of people in terms of stereotypes. She thinks she's well-meaning and that she likes her (mostly POC) students but she doth protest too much in her first person narration. She laughs at racist jokes and lets her cop buddies' running racist commentary go unquestioned. As far abuse of power and racism go, nothing has changed since '95 when this book came out.

Moore really delves into the topic of violence against women. She examines how women can be conditioned to prize brutishness in men and look down on signs of male "weakness" and vulnerability. Even though lack of the latter inhibits true intimacy and the presence of the former can often spell danger in a relationship. Moore also explores how men see women as objects (reduced to body parts) and are encouraged to display a kind of violent machismo. It's sad to see how the characters are trapped by gender roles. It breeds violence and disharmony and unhappiness and even death.

Frannie is interested in the differences between men and women in an anthropological way. And so is the book itself. There's all the reflexive lying between her and Malloy. It's second nature to them in man/woman relationships. The uneven footing that can exist between the sexes in heterosexual relationships is palpably felt. In the Cut dives into the thrill of playing at danger vs. the horror of actual inescapable danger. What is the difference between the archetypal "bad boy" and a truly evil man? It's a thin line between the two—how do you know which is which? How do you recognize a sociopath when men are conditioned to hide their true feelings? And when women are trained to ignore their instincts to get or please a man? The mounting suspense is aided by the fact that every man in Frannie's orbit feels like a threat, a potential suspect capable of violence.

In the Cut is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, as eventually it becomes something quite unflinching and horrifying. It even has the power to disgust. Fans of Gillian Flynn's darkest work will appreciate it. Both authors really scrutinize a misogynistic society from the POV of a woman living in it, trying to exist under patriarchy. 25 years post-In the Cut, it's an existence women around the world are still having to endure.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the things that interests me about sex is that it is a conspiracy of improvised myths. Very effective in evoking forbidden or hidden wishes. I hadn't realised I had so many of them until I met Jimmy Malloy.

A tight, taut, terrifying tale that shimmers with an oppressive sense of risk and danger as clever Frannie with her intellectual interests in language and her penchant for perilous, unsafe sex finds herself followed by various men while a misogynistic serial killer is at work in New York.

Moore is brilliant at creating a voice for her narrator and takes narrative risks herself, not least in the disturbingly wow ending. Acute on the permeable boundaries between eroticism and violence, on how power is gendered and subverted through the sexual, this also insists that brutality against women is both physical and ideological: disarticulated is the term used to describe the maiming of female bodies, a word which also carries within it an image of women made voiceless and mute.

Sharp, smart and focused, this is both a critique of all those slasher thrillers that make currency out of violated female bodies while at the same time probing the complicities implied by the popularity of the genre with female readers.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intelligent slim sly thriller in which you're never quite sure whether the characters are telling the truth. Also an interesting use of first-person narration, especially at the end, which I won't reveal, except that it left me saying: wow.

[Abbie | ab_reads]

(#gifted @orionbooks) Sex, murder and... linguistics? An odd combination for sure and I’m not entirely sure how well they tie together in this book... I was in the mood for something very fast earlier this week, as being super busy put me in danger of a reading slump! In the Cut certainly delivered on that part, as I devoured it in just a few hours.
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Part crime novel, part erotica, the action in this book never stops... except when the protagonist takes a break to muse on linguistic discrepancies and to give updates on the dictionary she’s working on. It was quite jarring when that happened, even though Moore’s writing was clear cut and readable. There are also some very steamy scenes so I would not recommend reading this one on the train or tube!
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It’s violent, grim and gritty, the characters are all horrible and make terrible decisions and I couldn’t tell if they were intentionally awful or if the book just hasn’t aged well - I do tend to think it’s intentional, that Moore wants her characters to be unlikeable and suffer for it.
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I saw a lot of comments on the wow-factor of the ending, and while it was certainly shocking, I felt a bit let down by the actual reveal.
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So did I enjoy it? Couldn’t tell you. Was it a compulsive read? Absolutely. Will I be recommending it? I think I’ll have to let you all decide for yourselves whether it’s a book for you.
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[Trish · Rating 1 out of 5]

I assume that in the film version of this, Meg Ryan doesn't get her nipple cut off.

I read this out of curiosity, because the movie got generally poor reviews, and I wondered if the book was better.

Plot summary: A single woman living in New York does many stupid things, and then dies.

Really. That's it. I can't even begin to list all of the ways this book didn't make sense to me. Maybe there really are people who move through life in such a dreamlike haze, and maybe their friends get decapitated and they get sliced by serial killer cops, but what am I, the poor reader, to take away from all this? The book is like a twisted fable, and the moral is either "don't talk to strange men. In fact, don't talk to any men" or maybe it's "tell the truth and you won't get dead" or possibly "enough with the erotic adventures! Look out for that knife!" or maybe just "don't be so damn stupid!"

[Patricia Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy book to read, not very long but in the end did not make that much sense to me. It was called an erotic thriller and it was full of very descriptive sex scenes between main character a police detective she was involved with. She met him because there was a murder in her neighborhood and he kept trying to find out if she saw anything. In the end the real killer had kidnapped her and she thought he was going to kill her and the ended. I just did not like the ending, did not make that much sense to me as I said before.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Susanna Moore's In the Cut is a strange and lucid thriller, vividly atmospheric, feverish and oppressively sinister. Frannie is a linguist and teacher, divorced and living alone in New York; she teaches creative writing to disadvantaged but gifted students and is also compiling a dictionary of local slang, excerpts from which pepper the narrative. At the beginning of the story, she goes to a bar with a male student - an act she feels uncertain about from the start - and, while looking for the toilet, she stumbles into the bar's basement and catches a handsome man getting a blowjob from a beautiful redheaded woman. The same woman later turns up dead, and Frannie, having frequented the bar, becomes caught up in the police investigation into the murder. Said investigation is led by an attractive but menacing detective named Malloy, who Frannie is drawn to but who she also (due to a distinctive tattoo on his wrist) suspects of being the man in the basement.

The story is set in the New York of the early 1990s, but it's hard to believe it's not taking place in an earlier era when you consider the attitudes of the characters. Although Frannie herself is an intelligent and independent woman, she's surrounded by racism, misogyny, homophobia, violence against women and constant intimidating behaviour from men. Aside from physical attraction, it's difficult to understand why she would want to get involved with the brutish Malloy. The sex scenes in the book are uncomfortable not because their content is particularly explicit, but because there is an underlying brutality and violence to them, a sense of threat, which is deeply disturbing.

The climax of the story is horrendously gruesome, but it also chucks in a twist (regarding the identity of the killer) which I found unforgivably obvious and lazy. The shock value of the ending feels like a convenient smokescreen for the weakness of the plot. Cornelius always hanging around is a too-easy red herring; killing off Frannie's best friend is a lazy move, as is the reveal of the other detective (can't remember his name - not a good sign) as the murderer, especially since he has the same tattoo as Malloy and Frannie doesn't notice this until the very end, despite meeting him on numerous occasions.

In the Cut isn't much cop (ha) as a murder mystery, but it is filled with suspense - not because you are caught up in the question of who the killer is, but simply because its depictions of everyday life and relatively normal activities are so tense and loaded with a constant aura of peril. It's been called sensual by a number of reviewers but while it is certainly sexual it is, in my opinion, much too dark and menacing to be called sensual - too soft a word for this book. Moore is a powerful writer and the palpable atmosphere she creates, pulsing off every page, is by far the strongest and most memorable thing about the novel.

[Vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this book up out of sheer perversity. Since this is billed as an erotic thriller, I should probably elaborate. Come closer, won't you?

So, the movie they made of this book. It has a good pedigree: interesting actors like Mark Ruffalo and Jennifer Jason Leigh star (also starring but not very interesting is Meg Ryan) and Jane Campion directs. It's terrible. It's ludicrous. It is compellingly watchable in its awfulness like a grittily rendered "Showgirls." It's been airing on the cable lately and I got curious. Was the source material equally awful or did it explain all the dead ends and nonsense in the movie?

Imagine my surprise then at how much I liked Moore's novel. It's the short but focused story of an English professor and language enthusiast who lives in the Washington Square area of Greenwich Village. She is writing a book on American slang and is obsessed with words. She lives a tidy, largely intellectual and emotionally-detached life, preferring to scrutinize and categorize feelings rather than experience them. She is divorced and has only one close friend and it soon becomes apparent that she has an unusual number of mentally unwell people in her personal orbit.

Into the midst of which falls a neighborhood serial killer and a homicide detective whom she finds irresistibly charming, leading her to pursue him with a sort of relentless bewilderment. He's also a racist, homophobe and a sociopathic liar who may or may not be the killer although Moore makes it both hazy and realistic enough that for the most part you don't question her (nameless) protagonist's lack of serious suspicion. And as crazy and intense as her attraction to him is, I completely bought it.

The language and love of language in this book was so vivid I was bound to love it. Add to that Moore's ability to reveal so much about a character with a single sentence, gesture or anecdote. Despite a few times when I cocked my head and said, "Really?" I'm going to give it four stars because I sat at my well-lit desk on my lunch hour reading the final pages and felt such a wave of cold wash over me that I had to get up and walk it off only to find that I couldn't.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that is probably best not read on public transport as the description of sex and violence are so graphic that you might not appreciate someone reading it over your shoulder.
Ostensibly it’s a slim book about the search for a serial killer of women but when I thought about the character of Frannie and the year it was written (1995) I actually think it is more a rumination on women, feminism women’s sexuality and the interplay between the sexes. 1995 is the year (in the UK at least) of the ladette the women who wanted to be like men – drinking and going to strip clubs etc. This is the time that women were sold stripping and pole dancing as empowering feminist activities and that to be against that was to be a prude and not one of the ‘cool girls’. So maybe I read too much into this book but I saw it as a sort of fable, the story of what happens to the woman who wants to be the ‘cool girl’. Frannie (an academic) witnesses a sex act and later discovers the woman involved is found murdered. To say much more would be to give the plot away but Frannie finds herself spending time with some very misogynistic men, laughing at the terrible jokes they tell about women, agreeing with their sexist rhetoric and lying about her own sexual experience to match theirs.
Frannie is not a likeable character but she does throw into relief the men’s attitude to women which all round is pretty abysmal and how even solvent, intelligent professional women can still fall victim to the need to man-please.
A grubby book in many ways that has elements of torture porn and actual porn but has an interesting take on the interplay between men and women.

[reading is my hustle · Rating 4 out of 5]

short novella about an isolated woman who becomes involved with a detective who she suspects is shady AF. this book is a lot. the title slang for vagina should have clued me in but it didn't. this is gruesome & mean but i think that is the point. there is so much misogyny in this story that i could write an essay about women's bodies & what Susanna Moore is saying about power & gender. also, the sex these characters have read as brutal & ugly but (again) i think that is the point. men write like this all the time & it is a non issue. women write like this & all the cranks come out.

EDIT 12/19:
in the cut has been reissued & the guardian reviews it in light of the #metoo movement.

[N · Rating 5 out of 5]

2025 Re-read

In the Cut is a novel that quivers -- with desire, with dread. In a grimy New York City where casual violence and chaos dominate, Franny may or may not be the target of a serial killer, and that serial killer may or may not be her new cop lover.

I've loved this book for a long time, but I always worry old favourites will lose their lustre when I re-read them (see: Girlfriend In a Coma , womp womp womp). In fact, I drank this down while I was ill and it was pure nectar -- it also took me 117 pages to notice there weren't any chapter breaks, because it's just THAT breathless. Alert the booktok'ers who want murder AND spice! They'd love this! (Sorry for using the word spice. I hate myself.)

Yeah, the subplot involving Franny's Black student Cornelius with him teaching her AAVE hasn't aged particularly well. And, this time around, the unprotected, un-negotiated sex acts made me wince in a way they didn't when I first read it.

Still, this novel is smooth as fine wine and burns like whiskey and you should gulp it down if you haven't already.

Original 2021 Review

When I first read In the Cut, I was swept up in its surface pleasures: the protagonist, Franny moves through seedy parts of New York City, but there’s a dark wonder to every scene; the poetry posted on the subway forms the backdrop to her story, as if it were placed there especially for her. As a teacher and writer, she rolls words on her tongue, obsessing over etymology, even dividing words into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It’s a wonderful world in which to immerse yourself. All of Franny’s experiences – notably, her sexual relationship with police detective, Malloy – are sharply-drawn; vivid, yet suggesting depths to be plumbed.

Those depths are exactly what continue to interest me on subsequent readings. While In the Cut is a sexy-dark mood piece, an interesting spin on the classic detective novel, it’s also a meditation on post-feminism and modern relationships. In the novel, the battle lines are drawn between men and women, between black and white people, and between the upper and lower classes. (Even though once-affluent Franny probably earns substantially less than detective Malloy, he can’t stop referencing his poor Washington Heights upbringing and she can’t shake her prim, moneyed politeness.) There’s no whitewashing to be found on gender, race and class: Susanna Moore delivers some hard truths without apology.

Though, as it turns out, Franny is being targeted by a killer, her paranoia about being followed, about her friends, acquaintances and prospective lovers being rapists, bear the brittle rattle of everyday thoughts for a city-dwelling woman. Moore evokes and then magnifies the uneasy sensation of being unsafe behind heavy locks on your front door.

In the Cut contains powerful material that begs to be re-read and considered at length.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great warm weather porch read. I read this in one day.

I knew about Jane Campion's film adaptation before I knew In the Cut was a book - Meg Ryan playing the titular woman, involved in an affair with fine-ass Mark Ruffalo, as a detective/maybe serial killer. Luckily it had been awhile since I'd seen the film, because as it goes, the book is way better.

Our protagonist, Frannie, is an english teacher obsessed with slang. She's smart, cool, confident - the kind of woman that many women would like to see themselves as. Men of all ages from all walks of life desire her, and she wants them but doesn't trust them at the same time. She stumbles into observing a basement tryst at a bar while meeting with a student, and can't get the man or the scene out of her mind. When the woman involved turns up murdered, Frannie is launched into a downright steamy affair with a detective on the case, who she believes to be the man she saw in the bar, and therefore possibly also the murderer.

If you like your thrillers/erotic thrillers with some good writing and character building, then In the Cut is what you're looking for. It's certainly not perfect. One of the plot points in particular requires a bit of a buy-in - I get why some reviewers struggle with the idea that Frannie wouldn't have noticed Rodriguez's tattoo - but then, remember that he knew she'd seen him and was likely actively trying to hide it and some attempts to deceive the reader are played a little too hard. But the flaws are outweighed by the things that help it stand apart - I appreciated the depictions of Frannie's relationships, particularly with her best friend, Pauline, and also that she has friendships with men, as well. You can tell a woman wrote this because of those kinds of details.

And, for as much as Frannie seems to have it all in some regards, she's not without her own insecurities and flaws, and it ultimately feels like everything that comes about is due to her own choices (or lack thereof).

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ethereal writing of Moore reminds me of a female James Salter--a purposeful detachment that conveys the protagonist's (Frannie's) detachment from her own life. Startling ironies hint at Frannie's personal tragedies--accumulated and melancholied--heaped in a corner of her heart and cresting to bleed out onto the pages. It is this prose that creates a vivid depth of feeling and a taut, fresh, exciting rigor of momentum.
Frannie is a scholarly woman--a linguist and a Creative Writing professor for intelligent students with low motivation. Frannie's personal despair and emptiness are well illustrated in the first few paragraphs. It is as if she is a shadow of herself or a mirror of the dereliction that she lives within--both in her soul and in the city. After she witnesses an erotic act between a wrist-tattooed man and a young woman, she becomes involved with the tattooed man--who she learns is a detective--although she thinks he may have killed the woman. She is turned on by the dangerous masculinity of the detective and the power of seedy erotica.

The murder/suspense thriller is, to me, the vehicle for a larger but more subtle story of personal isolation. The story serves as a medium for inner desolation and the loss of the soul. Most of the characters, whether they live or die, seem to have lost a chunk of their soul to the already embittered and fringed.

I love Moore's style of writing more than the story. At under 200 pages, it was quite short and therefore more brief in certain characterizations and relationships than a reader might desire. However, it may have been intentional to keep all the characters in shadow. I suppose Moore could be considered a nihilist (based solely on this book)---when you finish the book, the reaction you have is more a response to the concept of dreary insulation/isolation and the failure of human connections than it is an empathy for any particular character. If you are eagerly awaiting the arrival of hope, you will not be fulfilled in that quest. However, the author does give a layer of searing suspense, buoyancy, and liveliness to the mordant theme. It is piquant in sensuality and freshness, much like the ripe slicing of a juicy pomegranate.

[Sabrina Robinson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked the raw sex scenes. That pretty much was the whole appeal for me.

Update- I just reread this and even the sex scenes weren't that good. I think the author was trying to hard to be artsy. In my reread I got the impression the author was trying to make the main character seem cerebral and deep but it just made for disjointed dialogue and forced interactions. I couldn't finish it the second time.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

besties read this!!

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am honestly baffled as to what I just read, but I, in some way, am totally in awe of it at the same time. I picked this book up from the thrift store (my sissy bought it for me!), and I had never heard of it, but something about it seemed familiar. I still don't totally know what seemed familiar about it because the story was brand new, I'd never heard of the author, nor had I seen the cover. But I'm glad I picked it up, because what a weird and random roller coaster of a story.

I can't even really tell you the main reason for the plot. Nothing really totally happened. But the writing was so amazing, that it really didn't matter that no super crazy plot that was making me turn the pages. I was turning the pages super quick anyway because this character driven novel was written so well that the reader actually feels as if they are in the head of Frannie.

Basically, a quick little summary of this short and erotic novel - In the Cut is narrated by Frannie who is a professor at a local college. In the first few pages even, we realize she's a very sexual human being. While at a bar with one of her students, she goes to find the bathroom and instead walks into a room where a man is receiving a blow job from a redhead. She stops and stares at him, and the redhead is oblivious to someone entering, but the man continues to stare at Frannie in the eye through the whole thing, and she just stands there. She questions why she even did that, but she can't get the thought out of her mind. Later, she is approached by detectives asking about where she was a certain night and whether she had any information on the death of a woman killed the night she was at the bar. The woman murdered that they describe is a redhead. And the detective questioning her just so happens to be the man getting a bj at the bar. Frannie puts these things together, but that doesn't mean Detective James Malloy has anything to do with her death. But it does seem like a huge coincidence to her. A coincidence she doesn't bring up, because she wants to kind of let it play and see what happens.

During the time of the investigation, she and James Malloy create quite a relationship of sorts with each other. The scenes with James and Frannie are by far some of the best sex writing I have ever read. Something about it is SO raw and real. There was nothing cliche about the words being said and never did I question whether this could have happened between them. I almost felt their connection all the way through the book. The writing of this book is SO hot and steamy that I had to take pictures of some of the pages on my phone to keep lol!! There is something SO eerie, and the fact that the plot isn't hugely thrilling makes this book truly what it is. It is soooo character driven and well written that I want to actually read everything that this woman writes! So impressed with this.

I wouldn't recommend it to many. I even told my sister I didn't think she'd like it (and we usually like the same stuff!) And of course, she could. But it seems so unusual, it honestly might be too weird for some people.

[Ria · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a quote from Susanna Moore in the introduction of In The Cut that reads: "Either way they're going to get you. And that is pretty dark. The book offers no consolation". Hoo boy, is there a lot to unpack here.

This book has got me all confused. On the one hand, it was so unrelentingly grim, our heroine was so cavalier with her safety and willfully stupid about the risks around her, and the racism, misogyny, misanthropy and homophobia was hard to stomach. So boo to this book, two stars.

AND YET. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since finishing it yesterday. It got under my skin, and the sinister and unexpected ending will probably haunt me for a while. There are so many things about this book that speak to 2021, despite it being written in 1995. Take out the references to walkmans and you could easily be forgiven for thinking this was written more recently than it was. The book feels like it could be a commentary on the murder of Sarah Everard, and the problematic state of US policing in the 21st century, to pick a few recent headlines.

I couldn't help but wonder if the portrayal of sex in this book was more groundbreaking for a 1995 audience than for modern readers in a post-Sex And The City world (see what I did there?!). Sex devoid of heartfelt emotion is never going to be my bag, and I'm not entirely sure what the intention was behind Frannie's relationship with Molloy, it will be interesting to discuss at book club. Maybe it was around expectation setting, as I fully expected Molloy to be a white knight come the finale, so perhaps it was commentary on the idea of expecting men to save women? I was also unsure about Frannie's dynamic with Cornelius, was it meant to be a big old red herring ahead of the grim finale, white woman tears or a specific demonstration of Frannie's descent into inappropriate behaviour?

Interestingly, this was the first audiobook I've listened to from start to finish. I wonder if listening made it easier to digest, despite the very suspect accents employed throughout. As a companion piece to Sharp Objects in book club, I'm curious to hear what people have to say - I actually had a much tougher time reading Sharp Objects than I did this.

I read somewhere that Susanna Moore wrote In The Cut in response to being pigeonholed as a "women's fiction" writer. Choosing to write a dark erotic meditation on how women are screwed whether we put ourselves at risk or not is an interesting response to being seemingly dismissed as a women's fiction writer. Even this week, Jeanette Winterson got so mad about blurbs from reissues of her books that she burned them, all because she felt the blurbs turned her novels into "wimmins fiction of the worst kind". Whether it's 1995 or 2021, it seems there is no greater criticism to a 'serious' writer than to be called a writer of women's fiction.

Phew. So going with three stars because of all the thinking this has encouraged. But I'm totes going to read something life affirming next. Maybe some women's fiction?

[Stacey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've never read erotic literature per se, but there are parts of this book that I imagine would fall into that category. Those parts, the sexually explicit but not pornographic details, were the best thing about this book. The suspense that Moore was trying to create and build up throughout was certainly vivid at times but fell short at others. I wanted to know more, feel more about the protagonist and her motivations. Since I didn't, I felt rather indifferent at the end when she met her demise.
Oh, the other cool thing about this book is the mention of NYC places and streets. Moore wrote at a time (about 15 or so years ago, I think) when the city was a much less safe place, and she mentions streets and neighborhoods where muggings were frequent and a woman shouldn't walk alone at night--neighborhoods that now include some of the priciest residences in the city. I'm interested in the continuing transformation of the city, so I appreciated the details in this regard.

[Heather ~*dread mushrooms*~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn't figure out if this was intentionally offensive. God, the racist terms, and this ethnic group does this, and that ethnic group does that. And I couldn't figure out if the feminist stuff here and there was actually feminist or just a load of crap.

I liked the writing, at least.

But I was nearing the end and I was frantic because there didn't seem to be enough pages to finish the story.

And there weren't.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Content Warning: death, violence, murder, rape, sexual harassment, racism (including racial slurs), homophobia (including homophobic slurs), misogyny.


Frannie is a teacher. Her days are spent educating college-aged youths about language, its usages, writing, and the virtues of slang. In most respects, her life is ordinary -- she's divorced, single, and when she's not teaching, she dedicates herself to creating a dictionary of street slang. One night, Frannie is out at a bar, and sees something she isn't supposed to: an intimate moment between a man and a woman. Shaken and strangely enthralled, her world is turned upside down as a vicious serial killer stalks the streets of her neighborhood, and as she grows closer to one of the police officers working the case, Frannie realizes that the murders might be even closer to home than she thinks.

Adapted into a film that, at the time, was reviled by critics, In the Cut is an unapologetic look into gender-based violence, women's sexuality, and the often painful intersection of the two. At the time of its publication in 1995, it was considered slightly shocking, perhaps not so much because of its graphic sex scenes, but because of its frank and brutal insight into patriarchy. It's been on my list for a long time; I learned of the book first, and then later, saw bits and pieces of the film, enough to intrigue me to pick it up. Having finally gotten around to it, I'm left with mixed feelings on both its message and its impact.

To begin with, our protagonist, Frannie, is interesting. We're having a bit of an unlikable female character revolution right now -- the books of Moshfegh, Taddeo and Flynn come to mind -- and I think Frannie fits nicely into the category, although she might be considered more sympathetic than many of the darker, crueler characters who populate it. In spite of the dark, occasionally violent desires she harbors (mainly with regards to sex and men), she refreshingly exists somewhere between the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, prone both to prudishness and candor. Her romantic interest (if he can be called that) is Detective Malloy, a figure who represents the unsavory aspects of herself that Frannie seeks to suppress.

Malloy is both Frannie's mirror and her opposite: she, in her austerity, is attracted to his crude and vulgar way of speaking and acting. With him, she opens up to a side of herself that she wasn't aware existed in the first place. Truthfully, that's about as far as I'm able to understand why Frannie keeps coming back to him -- it doesn't shock me that a woman might keep returning to man who is brutish or provides a way for her to self-destruct, but it's his casual homophobia, sexism and racism that makes it baffling to me. It's interesting: Frannie thinks of herself as a feminist, someone openminded, and yet she never makes any effort either to question or challenge Malloy's biases. I'm not really sure why Moore felt the need to include it, let alone allow it to pass by without any introspection from Frannie.

Frannie's most interesting relationship is actually with Cornelius, one of her students, a young Black man who has a fascinating and complex way of using language that draws Frannie in. He ends up being underutilized; I often questioned why he was included in the first place, since in the end, he's brushed off without much fanfare. Her friendship with Pauline, too, is intriguing -- I wished there was a bit more of her, this woman who "dates married men because she wants to be alone on the holidays."

As for Moore's unraveling of patriarchal desire (and how women are dictated by men in every aspect of their lives), I thought it was good, but perhaps not as revelatory as it must've been in '95. Nonetheless, I think many feminists will find it to be a thought-provoking piece of literature, and I particularly enjoyed the way that Moore combines the erotic with the violent, the sexual with the grotesque. These things go hand-in-hand more often than we'd like to admit, and Moore excels at making her story engrossing in its repulsiveness.

Would I recommend it? That's a tough one. Once again, if you're interested in feminist literature, I think it's worth a go (especially when it comes to the misogyny of the '90s), but overall, there was something a touch unsatisfying about it. The strangely unchallenged racism, which I personally don't think Moore was equipped to handle in a fulfilling way, is the main reason why this book couldn't rise above the three star mark for me.

[Nila (digitalcreativepages) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A difficult book to review. It had a raw gritty feel with bold scenes and graphic words weaved in with the thoughts of the main character.

Frannie, a teacher, came across a woman performing a sexual act on a man with his face in darkness and tattoo on the wrist in the bar. The woman was then found murdered, and a detective came to her flat for questioning. A short affair with the detective was followed by a few shocking revelations.

My first book by author Susanna Moore, the story was shocking in the way it was written and hit me quite hard with its words. Frannie was quite an eclectic woman with a couple of friends. Best friend Pauline too was found murdered, and that nearly killed Frannie and made her take hasty decisions.

The human psyche was pondered upon. Ending was a horrifying twist which took me aback. Overall, this was a murder mystery with a serial killer as the back story and a bold woman living on her terms, comfortable in her own skin, at the forefront living the story.

A different read, indeed.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked her voice. A lot. But I'm still trying to figure out how this story is different from all the crap that lets rip with a strong female character, who has a dark sense of humor/fantasy that can't quite fight loneliness, a wide circle of friends across all kinds of tracks, and Lucite heels. And ends up dead after using "bad judgement," aka too much (intellectual) curiosity. This one @ the hands of a particularly fetishised Puerto Rican cop. "Mr. Goodbar" comes to mind, tho it was more sincere. And on a scale of 1-to-Dennis Cooper, about a 6.5 in dealing with its own fantasies of crime and punishment.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very strange book. Moore seems to hate her characters as much as Scott Smith hates his...she has no compassion for any of them and, as such, anything goes. The end is easily the most disturbing ending of any book I've ever read (Hollywood ditched the ending for the movie), sorta reminiscent of Blair Witch (in terms of making you say "holy crap, did that just happen?" vs supernatural). Not for the faint of heart.