Eyebabies is an unpleasant drama about a successful photographer and his relationship with two women— one his muse and the other eventually his nemesis. The novel has a surfeit of unlikely characters—rich, successful, beautiful and talented—who inhabit such fantastic places as a French chateau formerly owned by a count or the realms of the New York art scene. This is an overwritten soap opera with such overreaching affectations that it is difficult not to sometimes suspect it a parody, as, although set as a realist novel, the implausible nature of the story is hard to swallow. The protagonist Fabrice, a French aristocrat photographer, writes his memoirs of his two great loves. The novel is structured intertextually with the women explaining his memoirs to the French authorities who believe one, or both of them, may have tortured Fabrice and left him to die. Much of the dialogue is unrealistic and over-romanticised, the story itself becomes increasingly unlikely and hampered by its pretentions to analyse the nature of love. It is possible that this novel may be marketed to an audience interested in literary fiction, and despite all its flaws it is a readable—if deeply frustrating—work.

Nadine Whitney is a former bookseller and currently a teacher

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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