Bad Marie

At the start of Marcy Dermansky's novel Bad Marie, the eponymous protagonist has served six years in prison for assisting her boyfriend in armed robbery. When she's finally set free, nothing will stop her from the pleasures she craves: chocolate, whiskey, dreaming, physical comfort, silk robes, romantic adventure—and the novel Virginie at Sea. While babysitting for her childhood friend Ellen Kendall after her release, Marie sleeps with Benoit Doinel—the author of Virginie at Sea and, as it turns out, Ellen's husband. In no time, Marie runs away with him to Paris, making off with his daughter Caitlin as well. Marie is an unapologetic force of id, as much a victim of circumstance as of her own recklessness, and in Dermansky's finessed narrative, her adventures from New York to Paris to Mexico are as much a quest for happiness as a criminal picaresque. It is Dermansky's absolute control over contradiction—she makes Marie a dreamer, a pragmatist, a heroine, and a bête noir all at once—that supplies the novel with its abundant narrative energy. With Marie teetering wildly between impulse and cold calculation, anything can happen. And the things that do are delightfully wicked.