3 new thrillers refresh the idea of the femme fatale
She hires ghostwriter Zara Pines to help her with a memoir about succeeding despite a hardscrabble childhood. Zara is more than happy to join Jane at her lush Hamptons estate, eating her delicious food, swimming in her pool and eventually sleeping in her bed. As their affair progresses, Zara begins to look like her subject, wearing Jane’s clothes, eating her favorite meals and changing her hair to resemble Jane’s.
Jane combines the wiles of the femme fatale with the magnetic pull of a down-to-earth celebrity. The people who congregate by the gates of her estate are evidence of a zealous cult of personality. Jane doesn’t mind Zara’s transformation at all – in fact, she encourages it, using their resemblance to her advantage. “I Want You More” explores the murky details of Jane’s life story, which turns out to be less down-home and low-budget than advertised, and Zara’s overeager desire to be with Jane and to be Jane. Huntley slowly and skillfully reveals the extent of Jane’s deceptions. The book we are reading is not the whitewashed memoir Zara produced. It’s much better.
Asako Yuzuki’s “Butter” (Ecco, $30), translated by Polly Barton, is based on a story ripped from the Japanese headlines. In 2009, the country was riveted by the “Konkatsu Killer” case. Kanae Kijima poisoned three men – each her boyfriend at the time – and made the deaths look like accidents or suicides. A mother of five, Kijima hardly resembled a femme fatale: She was unkempt, frumpy, not stylish or conventionally pretty. But she was an excellent cook, and the kitchen can be as seductive a setting as the bedroom.
Yuzuki
draws
on
the case to create the character of Manako Kajii, a woman who poisons three of her lovers and awaits trial for her crimes. An ambitious journalist named Rika Machida befriends Manako, in hopes of persuading her to let Rika tell her story. Yet what grows between the women is much more complex than anyone – including the reader – could anticipate. “There are two things that I simply cannot tolerate,” Manako tells Rika. “Feminists and margarine.” Rika is quietly insulted by Manako, but her attitude changes the more time she spends with her, and the more of Manako’s food she eats.
The lure of “Butter” is the lure of butter: rich, salty and unctuous. The meal that Manako repeatedly makes for Rika is a simple but irresistible combination of butter, soy sauce and rice. Rika finds herself gaining weight until she resembles Manako, who has been fat-shamed and had her looks dissected by the misogynist media. “Butter” is both an exploration of the life of an unusual femme fatale and a subtle polemic against the impossible beauty standards to which women are held.
In Anna Dorn’s subversive “Perfume & Pain” (Simon & Schuster, $18.99, paperback), Astrid Dahl, a 30-something novelist famous for starting the online Sapphic Scribes writing group, is spiraling. After a string of successful novels, her life is chaotic, her writing incoherent. The source of Astrid’s tumble is a constant stream of uppers (amphetamines, Adderall, etc.) blunted by beer, a cocktail she calls the Patricia Highsmith. Astrid is convinced that this concoction fuels her writing, and she needs another hit: “I need to write the nonexistent book I told Agent
Allison I was writing, the novel I said would get us rich. I could write an original adaptation of ‘Perfume and Pain,’ a lesbian pulp revival, a delicious campy delight.”
Dorn has constructed her own delicious campy delight. Astrid is an immensely appealing character – sardonic, confident, intermittently sharp depending on the chemicals in her system; so appealing that the reader might overlook her self-destruction. She is as untrustworthy as narrators get, and there is so much outlandish texting under the influence that her phone should have a breathalyzer attached. Part of the fun of this ride is Astrid’s revolving door of crushes and conquests, from her tedious neighbor, Penelope, to the newest member of the Sapphic Scribes, Ivy. Poison Ivy, as she comes to be known, is writing a dissertation about queer fiction.