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Duplicity
Dispatched by their mother to learn why his estranged twin brother Gregory (or "Brock Jones, PhD," as he's known to fans of his bestselling self-help book Coffee, Black) has disappeared, Stewart Detweiler drives 1,500 miles to find his twin hanging from a ceiling beam in their deceased father's lakeside A-frame. But instead of reporting him dead, Stewart decides to become him. As he sees it, he's not taking his brother's life; he's saving it. In turn he will at last gain an audience for his novel-in-perpetual-progress the plot of which bears an uncanny resemblance to this one. At first Stewart's plan goes smoothly. But before long the motives behind his brother's suicide emerge, pointing to intrigue, extortion, and desperate measures taken with disastrous results.
The bonds of family; success and failure; philosophy and quantum mechanics; the ways in which we can - and cannot - rewrite our own lives: DUPLICITY weaves all of these together into a riveting tale while vivisecting its own genre.
The bonds of family; success and failure; philosophy and quantum mechanics; the ways in which we can - and cannot - rewrite our own lives: DUPLICITY weaves all of these together into a riveting tale while vivisecting its own genre.
396 pages, Paperback
Published December 7, 2020
4 people are currently reading
47 people want to read
About the author
Peter Selgin
25 books63 followersPeter Selgin is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction, Life Goes to the Movies, a novel, two books on the craft of fiction, and two children’s books. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies, including Glimmer Train Stories, Poets & Writers, The Sun, Slate, Colorado Review, Writers and Their Notebooks, Writing Fiction, and Best American Essays 2009. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man: An Artist’s Memoir, was recently published by the University of Iowa Press and was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His latest novel, The Water Master, won this years’ Pirate’s Alley / Faulkner Society Prize, and his essay, The Kuhreihen Melody, won the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Selgin’s visual art has graced the pages of the The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Gourmet, and other publications. Selgin has had several plays published and produced, including Night Blooming Serious, which won the Mill Mountain Theater Competition. His full-length play, A God in the House, based on Dr. Kevorkian and his suicide device, was a National Playwright’s Conference Winner and later optioned for Off-Broadway. He teaches at Antioch University’s MFA writing program and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia College.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 26, 2021
Peter Selgin’s Duplicity is one of the most original, intelligent and entertaining novels by an American writer I have ever read. Framed as a “found manuscript” with an afterword by Prof. Gayton Sinclair, PhD, Duplicity is a multi-layered novel that can be read as a mystery, a meta-story about how to write a novel, and a reflection on identity--all in all a very ambitious novel whose author states via his protagonist that he would like to write the most unpredictable novel of all times.
On one level, Duplicity explores the question of identity: a novel about two twin brothers, Stewart Detweiler and his brother Greg, its multiple digressions on the idea of the double are fascinating:
"The Millionaire and the Pauper: they were one, bound together in each of us. One couldn’t exist without the other. Those equal opposite clichés, they represented the antipodal natures existing in each of us: rich and poor; good and evil; dark and light; needy and greedy; raging and calm; winner and loser; weak and strong; triumph and tragedy; love and hate. Each of us is two people.
Metaphorically, everyone is a twin. My other self just happened to come with its own body." (42)
In other words: this novel is about two twin brothers, but it is also about human nature, about our dual nature as humans. It is also a hilarious parody of the cliché that underlines so many best-sellers: “X event changed my life.” After an epiphany at the bord of a plane when he decides to change his coffee drinking habits, Greg Detweiler publishes one of those fast-food self-help books that become instantaneous best-sellers, Coffee Black, under a newly assumed identity, Brock Jones, PhD. This life-changing event triggered by a cup of black coffee—a sort of anti-Proustian potion without a madeleine—is a momentous occasion of very tangible and measurable consequences, such as the improvement of Greg’s (now Brock’s) erections “by what might be called immaculate enhancement” (51). Greg’s metamorphosis into Brock is all the more hilarious as the parody is superimposed over Kafka’s “Metamorphosis:” “a metamorphosis as comprehensive as the one that transforms poor Gregor Samsa into a giant beetle in his bed” (52)--in this case, the beetle is replaced by a giant penis. One could make a list of all the qualities that represent the dual nature of the two brothers: enhanced virility (Brock)/impotence due to prostate problems (Stewart); literary success (Brock)/failure (Stewart); rich and famous (Brock)/poor and anonymous (Stewart). This mirror effect is maintained throughout the novel: Stewart Detweiler can’t publish the novel he is working on because his agent rejects it preferring instead the purple prose of his cunning and ambitious student, the sexy blonde, Ashley, with whom he has an affair—and this affair mirrors the affair his brother, Greg, apparently had with a sixteen-year-old girl whose uncle turns out to have played a role in his disappearance.
The novel has many twists and turns, starting with the paradoxically climactic beginning: “HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF YOU FOUND YOURSELF DEAD?”—when Stewart finds his twin brother hanging from a beam in their father’s lakeside cottage (a father who has committed suicide in the same way), and decides to take on his identity. In order to become his brother, Stewart has to first dispose of his corpse, and in order to dispose of the corpse, he needs to place the heavy body into a boat, take the boat on the lake and fake a drowning. Not only does Stewart have to eliminate his brother’s body: in order to do it he has to make sure the body will never resurface, which means that he needs to cut his stomach open to allow for the body to release gas. “In that moment, with that slice of that knife in that belly, I achieved a perfect balance of detachment, concentration and creative bliss.” The cutting open of a body is being compared to the creative act, such as applying “a brushstroke to a canvas” or “nailing a perfect sentence to the page” (171). In this example as in many others, Selgin is telling us how he wrote Duplicity, which is also the title of the novel Stewart Detweiler has been working on, unsuccessfully trying to sell it to his agent. He is telling us that a novel’s content is often a substitute for how a novel came into being: the cutting of the corpse is merely a metaphor for the precise act of creation.
"I was performing not just the task of a surgeon, but of a novelist, exposing to daylight . . . the innards of my character[s], though as any novelist worth his or her salt will tell you the innards they tear out and expose to the reader’s scrutiny are none other than their own. It’s the novelist’s human soul that he cuts open and bares to the world, herself in the guise of the characters that she eviscerates. . . . Every novel is a confession and a vivisection, every novelist a surgeon—not of the flesh, but of the spirit—whose operations are performed strictly on paper." (172)
If you aren’t a writer, you may find the above less interesting than I did, but this doesn’t mean that this novel isn’t for you. Like most great novels, Duplicity has many levels: on one level it can be read as a mystery about two competing twins and the enigmatic disappearance of one of them. On another level, the novel tells its own story, a story about how to write a novel, a story about its own existence, yet you won’t find here the usual clichés one often reads when this topic is approached (i.e., the “process” or the “craft”). Instead, you’ll read this: “A novel reduced to rubble. A self-destructing novel. Why is this idea so attractive to me?” (296) Or: “he wants to write not for the age but for the ages” (326).
Indeed, Duplicity “self-destructs” in a certain way: framed as “Book A,” the novel ends with “Book B has been absorbed by Book A” (context: at some point, Stewart tells us that certain twin pregnancies end with one of the twins being “absorbed” by the other). After impersonating his twin brother who has committed suicide, Stewart’s story absorbs that of his twin. But, as we are being told, his twin is not only Gregory: “The narrator confesses, and in confessing he makes of the reader an identical image of himself. Novel as womb wherein cells divide, egg splits. Reader becomes author’s ‘twin . . . .’ As for me, I will have been absorbed—by you” (362).
Duplicity does find, eventually, a publisher via Gayton Sinclair, PhD, who reads the manuscript after Stewart’s death—and so, the novel’s first line, “HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF YOU FOUND YOURSELF DEAD?”, is no longer figurative—that is, it no longer refers only to the narrator’s twin but to the narrator himself, Stewart (and insofar as Stewart Detweiler has written the same novel as Peter Selgin, it announces the very death of the latter). The very existence of this novel, in this specific form, with the logo of Serving House Books on it—one of those small presses whose authors are condemned to a slow death by the American publishing industry—is an indictment of this very industry and of those who call themselves cultural gatekeepers in this country in which more than a million books are published every year, tons of garbage vomited into the faces of a numbed-down population, yet an exceptional creation is relegated to ... well, self-destruction.
On one level, Duplicity explores the question of identity: a novel about two twin brothers, Stewart Detweiler and his brother Greg, its multiple digressions on the idea of the double are fascinating:
"The Millionaire and the Pauper: they were one, bound together in each of us. One couldn’t exist without the other. Those equal opposite clichés, they represented the antipodal natures existing in each of us: rich and poor; good and evil; dark and light; needy and greedy; raging and calm; winner and loser; weak and strong; triumph and tragedy; love and hate. Each of us is two people.
Metaphorically, everyone is a twin. My other self just happened to come with its own body." (42)
In other words: this novel is about two twin brothers, but it is also about human nature, about our dual nature as humans. It is also a hilarious parody of the cliché that underlines so many best-sellers: “X event changed my life.” After an epiphany at the bord of a plane when he decides to change his coffee drinking habits, Greg Detweiler publishes one of those fast-food self-help books that become instantaneous best-sellers, Coffee Black, under a newly assumed identity, Brock Jones, PhD. This life-changing event triggered by a cup of black coffee—a sort of anti-Proustian potion without a madeleine—is a momentous occasion of very tangible and measurable consequences, such as the improvement of Greg’s (now Brock’s) erections “by what might be called immaculate enhancement” (51). Greg’s metamorphosis into Brock is all the more hilarious as the parody is superimposed over Kafka’s “Metamorphosis:” “a metamorphosis as comprehensive as the one that transforms poor Gregor Samsa into a giant beetle in his bed” (52)--in this case, the beetle is replaced by a giant penis. One could make a list of all the qualities that represent the dual nature of the two brothers: enhanced virility (Brock)/impotence due to prostate problems (Stewart); literary success (Brock)/failure (Stewart); rich and famous (Brock)/poor and anonymous (Stewart). This mirror effect is maintained throughout the novel: Stewart Detweiler can’t publish the novel he is working on because his agent rejects it preferring instead the purple prose of his cunning and ambitious student, the sexy blonde, Ashley, with whom he has an affair—and this affair mirrors the affair his brother, Greg, apparently had with a sixteen-year-old girl whose uncle turns out to have played a role in his disappearance.
The novel has many twists and turns, starting with the paradoxically climactic beginning: “HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF YOU FOUND YOURSELF DEAD?”—when Stewart finds his twin brother hanging from a beam in their father’s lakeside cottage (a father who has committed suicide in the same way), and decides to take on his identity. In order to become his brother, Stewart has to first dispose of his corpse, and in order to dispose of the corpse, he needs to place the heavy body into a boat, take the boat on the lake and fake a drowning. Not only does Stewart have to eliminate his brother’s body: in order to do it he has to make sure the body will never resurface, which means that he needs to cut his stomach open to allow for the body to release gas. “In that moment, with that slice of that knife in that belly, I achieved a perfect balance of detachment, concentration and creative bliss.” The cutting open of a body is being compared to the creative act, such as applying “a brushstroke to a canvas” or “nailing a perfect sentence to the page” (171). In this example as in many others, Selgin is telling us how he wrote Duplicity, which is also the title of the novel Stewart Detweiler has been working on, unsuccessfully trying to sell it to his agent. He is telling us that a novel’s content is often a substitute for how a novel came into being: the cutting of the corpse is merely a metaphor for the precise act of creation.
"I was performing not just the task of a surgeon, but of a novelist, exposing to daylight . . . the innards of my character[s], though as any novelist worth his or her salt will tell you the innards they tear out and expose to the reader’s scrutiny are none other than their own. It’s the novelist’s human soul that he cuts open and bares to the world, herself in the guise of the characters that she eviscerates. . . . Every novel is a confession and a vivisection, every novelist a surgeon—not of the flesh, but of the spirit—whose operations are performed strictly on paper." (172)
If you aren’t a writer, you may find the above less interesting than I did, but this doesn’t mean that this novel isn’t for you. Like most great novels, Duplicity has many levels: on one level it can be read as a mystery about two competing twins and the enigmatic disappearance of one of them. On another level, the novel tells its own story, a story about how to write a novel, a story about its own existence, yet you won’t find here the usual clichés one often reads when this topic is approached (i.e., the “process” or the “craft”). Instead, you’ll read this: “A novel reduced to rubble. A self-destructing novel. Why is this idea so attractive to me?” (296) Or: “he wants to write not for the age but for the ages” (326).
Indeed, Duplicity “self-destructs” in a certain way: framed as “Book A,” the novel ends with “Book B has been absorbed by Book A” (context: at some point, Stewart tells us that certain twin pregnancies end with one of the twins being “absorbed” by the other). After impersonating his twin brother who has committed suicide, Stewart’s story absorbs that of his twin. But, as we are being told, his twin is not only Gregory: “The narrator confesses, and in confessing he makes of the reader an identical image of himself. Novel as womb wherein cells divide, egg splits. Reader becomes author’s ‘twin . . . .’ As for me, I will have been absorbed—by you” (362).
Duplicity does find, eventually, a publisher via Gayton Sinclair, PhD, who reads the manuscript after Stewart’s death—and so, the novel’s first line, “HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF YOU FOUND YOURSELF DEAD?”, is no longer figurative—that is, it no longer refers only to the narrator’s twin but to the narrator himself, Stewart (and insofar as Stewart Detweiler has written the same novel as Peter Selgin, it announces the very death of the latter). The very existence of this novel, in this specific form, with the logo of Serving House Books on it—one of those small presses whose authors are condemned to a slow death by the American publishing industry—is an indictment of this very industry and of those who call themselves cultural gatekeepers in this country in which more than a million books are published every year, tons of garbage vomited into the faces of a numbed-down population, yet an exceptional creation is relegated to ... well, self-destruction.
January 21, 2021
I've read almost all of Selgin's books, including his craft books which are wonderful. This, IMHO, is his finest work. A superb novel that just hums along, reads like butter—which is noteworthy in view of how often the duplicitous narrator goes off on delicious digressions, tangents and editorializing wry commentary. I just flew this through this book and thoroughly enjoyed every page. Selgin never confuses the reader, keeps everything clear and accessible. Even the highly-intellectual pompous asides are informative (I ordered up at least one of the books the first-person narrator cites). This is not only a book for all readers, but writers especially will savor it.
Lastly, Selgin's comic skills are astounding. This is a very, very funny novel. Notes of Portis, Nabokov (especially Lolita) and Patrick de Witt can be detected. There is something genuinely humorous on every page. Duplicity is terrific in every way. I'm recommending it to everyone I meet.
Lastly, Selgin's comic skills are astounding. This is a very, very funny novel. Notes of Portis, Nabokov (especially Lolita) and Patrick de Witt can be detected. There is something genuinely humorous on every page. Duplicity is terrific in every way. I'm recommending it to everyone I meet.
December 28, 2020
The story opens with a startling moment - Stewart Detweiler, failed novelist, finds his twin brother hanging from a beam in a remote lakeside house. But instead of reporting the death, he adopts his dead brother's identity. The narrative splits, to tell us about Stewart's life in the past, and his life from the moment he makes this heartstopping discovery.
Stewart is also a creative writing teacher, and a jaded one, so the narrative is peppered with awareness that he is writing, references to cliches he sees too frequently in his students' work. Frequently, he tells us that we mustn't necessarily believe what we read. So duplicity abounds - both in terms of subjectivity and truth and in terms of duplication.
Stewart is, of course, duplicated, but his dead brother is duplicated even more - he reinvented himself as a bestselling lifestyle guru and changing his name - a change that Stewart was unaware of until he saw a subway poster. Another angle on duplicity: Stewart feels like he has been fooled.
With duplicities nesting into each other like Russian dolls, this is the kind of book that can become confusing, too fond of its clever contradictions, too muddled and meta. This can make for sterile reading as it seems to tell the reader 'don't take this seriously, none of it is real, you fool'. Selgin's Duplicity doesn't. He is a writer with heart, and also with great craft - so while he is creating clever conundrums, they are totally believable. Selgin keeps you involved with the tormented human at their centre, even when his behaviour is embarrassing. Even when he is talking about tired writing and cliches, because he himself is tired of writing - somehow, Selgin tells us this with language and imagery that is fresh and inventive, which makes it real.
It's a book that's interested in questions of twinhood, but ultimately, they aren't dry and philosphical. They're human - about the various people we are, how we disappoint ourselves, perhaps sabotage ourselves, perhaps become emboiled in rivalries that aren't reciprocated or don't exist. Thought provoking and involving.
I received a copy of this book via the author and am reviewing it voluntarily.
Stewart is also a creative writing teacher, and a jaded one, so the narrative is peppered with awareness that he is writing, references to cliches he sees too frequently in his students' work. Frequently, he tells us that we mustn't necessarily believe what we read. So duplicity abounds - both in terms of subjectivity and truth and in terms of duplication.
Stewart is, of course, duplicated, but his dead brother is duplicated even more - he reinvented himself as a bestselling lifestyle guru and changing his name - a change that Stewart was unaware of until he saw a subway poster. Another angle on duplicity: Stewart feels like he has been fooled.
With duplicities nesting into each other like Russian dolls, this is the kind of book that can become confusing, too fond of its clever contradictions, too muddled and meta. This can make for sterile reading as it seems to tell the reader 'don't take this seriously, none of it is real, you fool'. Selgin's Duplicity doesn't. He is a writer with heart, and also with great craft - so while he is creating clever conundrums, they are totally believable. Selgin keeps you involved with the tormented human at their centre, even when his behaviour is embarrassing. Even when he is talking about tired writing and cliches, because he himself is tired of writing - somehow, Selgin tells us this with language and imagery that is fresh and inventive, which makes it real.
It's a book that's interested in questions of twinhood, but ultimately, they aren't dry and philosphical. They're human - about the various people we are, how we disappoint ourselves, perhaps sabotage ourselves, perhaps become emboiled in rivalries that aren't reciprocated or don't exist. Thought provoking and involving.
I received a copy of this book via the author and am reviewing it voluntarily.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 28, 2020
I received a copy of this book via the author and I’m reviewing it voluntarily.
Just from seeing the title, the cover with Stewart Detweiler crossed out, I knew this wouldn't be your average read. And I wasn't disappointed.
This book is truly like a spiral staircase winding down into ever more complex and meta commentary. A book about duplicity in every sense of the term, bouncing between an opus in the works and a confession, it is delightful. Detweiler's voice is wry and insufferable at times. This novel takes the twins switching places cliche into something new; refreshing but dark. The prose is lyrical and the plot genuine, despite the twists and turns. The jabs about the expectations of the craft of writing were amusing, especially as the author/narrator immediately demonstrates them seamlessly into his work as he goes along. That aspect reminded me immensely of Raymond Queneau and his Exercises of Style. I highly recommend this novel for its avant-garde structure, plot and unreliable narrator. A bit too philosophical at times, a little too "aware," it is regardless a gripping read. I read it within a few days.
Just from seeing the title, the cover with Stewart Detweiler crossed out, I knew this wouldn't be your average read. And I wasn't disappointed.
This book is truly like a spiral staircase winding down into ever more complex and meta commentary. A book about duplicity in every sense of the term, bouncing between an opus in the works and a confession, it is delightful. Detweiler's voice is wry and insufferable at times. This novel takes the twins switching places cliche into something new; refreshing but dark. The prose is lyrical and the plot genuine, despite the twists and turns. The jabs about the expectations of the craft of writing were amusing, especially as the author/narrator immediately demonstrates them seamlessly into his work as he goes along. That aspect reminded me immensely of Raymond Queneau and his Exercises of Style. I highly recommend this novel for its avant-garde structure, plot and unreliable narrator. A bit too philosophical at times, a little too "aware," it is regardless a gripping read. I read it within a few days.
January 8, 2021
Is it a twisting crime story? A philosophical treatise? A novel turned inside out? Or is it a sly knowing wink to the reader? Answer: it’s all of this. DUPLICITY is probably unlike most things you’ve read. Yes, there are the trappings of the crime novel —death and concealment, hovering guilt, suspicious investigators— but there’s a lot more going on as well. Above all, it’s an ambitious work of literature that turns the very notion of narrative topsy turvy. The combination of intellectual gymnastics, wry observances, and converging plotlines is a heady brew. What stands out in this clever swirl of “what’s real here and what isn’t?” is the simple truth that Selgin is a mighty good writer with a compelling voice, one that clearly deserves to be heard.
January 2, 2021
What other reviewers have written is true: “Duplicity” is “a provocative meditation on the writing life,” “an irresistible riddle,” and a “masterful literary work.” Best of all, it is really, really funny. How rare is that? Not only did I find myself laughing out loud, I wanted to call friends and read them passages so they, too, could laugh––even at the darkly comic scene where the narrator saws his dead twin brother in two (yes, yes, it is true!) creating another pair of “perfect halves” in a book rife with dualities of every sort. Indeed, at every turn, we are asked to accept twin perspectives, meanings, ways of being. That’s life. That’s “Duplicity”––a joy to read.
March 23, 2021
Duplicity, by Peter Selgin, is one of those books that cause the reader to lean forward in her chair, pen in hand, underlining every sentence and filling the margins with copious notes. Several lines per page must be highlighted, marking epiphanies and remarkable surprises. The brain thinks, the Truth, the Truth, the Truth, while a slow grin forms and the words come from the depths, like the Easter Triduum, “Duped! Duped! I’ve been duped! This is one of the most engrossing books I’ve read in a long time. Congratulations to the author for creating “a plot to die for!”
Sandra Worsham, author of Going to Wings
Sandra Worsham, author of Going to Wings
December 31, 2020
I loved everything about this novel—the intricacy, the narrative voice, its spiraling and inventive structure, and how it plays with ideas of how a novel can function and sends up the “rules” of writing. I read it in two days, absolutely riveted. It’s odd to call a book like this a page-turner, but for me it was.
March 7, 2022
I appreciate his distinct voice throughout the story. It reminds me of a highbrow Junot Diaz. It carried me through some pretty byzantine "found manuscript" plotting like Pale Fire and House of Leaves and some not unwelcome (to me anyway) writing school advice.
March 29, 2021
As engaging as this story is, it is also a Master Class in writing. As a writer myself, I got twice the bang out of it.
November 14, 2021
Interesting. Unusual plot. Alot of side track bull chat. But plot twists.
January 28, 2022
2021 Best Indie Book Award Winner!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews