Muriella Pent
by Russell Smith
Doubleday Canada
Muriella Pent is Russell Smith's first full-length novel since the critically acclaimed Noise. This post-colonial comedy is the story of what happens when Caribbean writer Marcus Royston, a worldly, Oxford-educated, jaded writer from the island of Saint Andrew's finds himself sent to Canada on a cultural exchange, and lodged in the sprawling art nouveau mansion of middle-aged socialite Muriella Pent.
Royston's motivations are self-advancing, and both find themselves pawns of the politically motivated arts committee behind the exchange program. When two young university students—a boy and a girl who hate each other—are drawn into Royston's fractious orbit, a decidedly unpleasant sexual competition occurs, and life in the leafy enclave of Stilwoode Park becomes more artistic than any of the exchange's sponsors had ever hoped.
At times funny, melancholy, and sexually depraved, Muriella Pent is told through a collage of dialogue, letters, newspaper articles, and diary entries. It is an unnerving satire about age and youth, desire and privilege, and about warring definitions of art among people from different parts of the former British Empire.
Russell Smith
Russell Smith is the author of the illustrated adult fable The Princess and the Whiskheads, the short story collection Young Men, nominated for the Toronto Book Awards in 2000, and the novels Noise and How Insensitive. How Insensitive was nominated for the Governor General's Award and the Trillium Award. Smith has also published short fiction and poetry in a variety of journals, including The Queen's Quarterly, Malahat Review, Quarry, New Quarterly, Carousel, Kairos and The Queen Street Quarterly. His story "Fun Girls" was selected for Best Canadian Stories 2003 (Oberon Press). He writes a weekly column in The Globe and Mail. Russell lives in Toronto.
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