Neck

Beginning in the early 1980s, Neck is the story of Greggory Moore, a middle-aged English professor who lucks into a faculty exchange program with his university's sister campus in Leningrad. There, he meets Lizaveta, a young nurse struggling to survive in the wake of her husband's untimely death. They marry and leave for the U.S. to begin their life together. Greggory is blissfully in love, but he slowly comes to detect a pattern of deception on Lizaveta's part. After she becomes reacquainted with her dead husband's best friend, Greggory begins to suspect his wife of infidelity; but he soon learns that her secrets were much more profound than he had imagined. Neck is also about misinterpretation, inference, and artificiality as they play out within questions of love and the verifiability of existence itself. It is a text constructed by an author who shares the author's name and yet is firmly the author's creation, almost able to sense the artificiality in the construction of both his story and himself.