The True Work of Art 
 "Do you ever feel guilty about using people in your life as material?" And rising indie film director Sophie Stark answers that she does not understand the words in the question; what else can movies be made from, if not people? But, in private, we have also heard her say, to the man who would become her husband: "I think I'm one of those crabs, where it builds itself out of the parts of other animals." Those of us who write, or who work in theater, or I suppose even more in film, know how true this is. People are indeed our raw material, and the art we make changes them as it changes us. 
 The novel begins with a bang, in what looks like a stand-alone story. Three stories, actually, but they combine to make one terrific piece of short fiction. The narrator, a young woman called Allison, at an open-mic night in the New York bar, tells a creepy tale about growing up in West Virginia. She gets a lot of applause, but one young woman takes her aside. "That's not a true story, is it?" she asks. Allison admits that it is not, but goes on to tell us the true one, which is less spectacular but also richer, more believable, more nuanced. The woman introduces herself as Sophie, and tells her that she would like to make a movie around Allison. And so she does, on a miniscule-budget and without much experience, but with a shocking core of truth. By using personal matters that Allison had told her in confidence, Sophie has made Allison's first and second stories into a third, a true work of art, but gained at the expense of their friendship. 
 Other stories follow, as other narrators tell different aspects from Sophie's life. Her younger brother follows her to her midwestern college, where she makes an obsessive movie about a basketball star, and is almost killed by the man's girlfriend. A struggling rock musician gets her to make a video that turns his relatively conventional imagery into something sinister and death-laden, but hypnotic. The former basketball player returns as narrator to describe, at a distance, a movie in which Sophie achieves her first widely-acclaimed success by subverting the story of the death of her husband's mother. A minor Hollywood producer engages her to breathe life into a tired costume drama, only to see it slip from his hands into hers. 
 At about this time, North cannily moves away from the episodic "This Is Your Life" or celebrity-roast structure, although the book is still told as a series of separate episodes. Allison, the first narrator, returns, not only as an actress in one of Sophie's movies, but as a protagonist in her own right. For the first time, it is not only Sophie who manipulates others to make art but now Allison also; the pupil has become the master. It is a striking development, one which has the effect of pulling all the other threads of the novel together, and driving it to the tragic conclusion implied by the title. 
 And what of Sophie herself? On the one hand, the crab image is true: she is entirely comprised of the pieces of other people; even her name is a fake, stolen from some photograph she claims to have seen in an exhibition. But I know her, absolutely I do. I have been in her shoes more than once myself but, less uncompromising artist that I am, have turned away at the crossroads that led to her wilderness. I most certainly admire her, not only for her genius as an artist, but also for her extraordinary ability to listen to other people and understand them. And, slightly to my surprise, I find myself liking her, feeling a combination of awe and empathy that--however misplaced--might well have grown into love.