The Edge of Pleasure Book

Gilver Memmer is running short of time. He is an enormously gifted painter, staggeringly good-looking, and profoundly self-involved, a cross between every woman's dream and every woman's worst nightmare. Great though his creative gifts may be, they cannot save him from dissolution. No longer the London art scene's wunderkind, he is getting by on the fumes of his former luck and sliding inexorably-though with a certain self-destructive elegance-toward oblivion. Into Gilver's life come two women: one who wants to push him into the grave he has been digging for himself and another who just might save him from it.

Publishers Weekly

Stockley presents a stylish portrait of a formerly famous artist as a not-so-young man. Once a "gorgeous, lone, enigmatic male," with a fabulous early career, painter Gilver Memmer, now 42, has slipped into alcoholism, set aside his paintbrush for a decade and retreated into self-imposed exile from his former London social circles. Two women penetrate the realm of his near-seclusion. Alice longs to be part of his future, hoping to help him become the man he once was. But Juliette, who just happens to be Alice's best friend, is a woman from Gilver's past intent on exacting revenge for a transgression of his 15 years earlier. None of the characters is likable, but the glittering narrative exerts a strong pull. Gilver's habit of rough, narcissistic sex complicates a later "did he or didn't he" rape scenario in which Stockley wisely steers clear of the reformed-bad-boy clich . Stockley's novel (after A Factory of Cunning) revels in London's glamorous art world, but also teeters uncomfortably close to the edge of something much darker. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.