Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from "a writer to keep a close eye on" ( The New York Times Book Review )
"Precise and spellbinding . . . That knotty relationship, as propulsive as it is maddening, forces the reader to wonder: How do you separate your art from the people--and painful experiences--that helped to forge it?"-- Vogue
A BEST BOOK OF THE SEASON: Bustle, Debutiful, Harper's Bazaar
I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. Yet I don't know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow.
Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she's seeking answers--about how to live a good life and what it means to make art--through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends.
But when the antagonist of her novel--her old painting professor--reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it.
A pristine and provocative high-wire act toggling the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive and the possibilities that lie beyond them, Discipline launches a spellbinding inquiry into the nature of art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.
Publisher Annotation: I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. Yet I dont know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow. Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she’s seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she’s imagined it. A pristine and provocative high-wire act toggling the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive and the possibilities that lie beyond them, Discipline launches a spellbinding inquiry into the nature of art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release. DEBUT NOVEL 224pp., 30K.
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Publishers Weekly Review
Pham, author of the memoir Pop Song, turns to fiction with the dazzling story of an art critic who publishes a novel about the former professor who rejected her after their affair. On Christine's book tour, she takes stock of her motivations for writing the novel, reexamines her connection to the work of the artists who shaped her, and reflects on how she floundered in art school until a popular professor began consistently praising her work and extending invitations to his home for social gatherings. After they had sex, he stopped contacting Christine, causing her to spiral and cease painting altogether ("It was too hard to decouple my work from my body, which felt like something I was carrying around, burdened with and stained by association"). Pham's novel takes a dramatic turn when Christine begins receiving cryptic messages from the professor, who invites her to visit him in Maine. It's a page-turner, but the main event is Christine's meditations on art, ambition, and the relationship between art and life, as when she looks at the photorealistic paintings of Vija Celmins ("I had never truly tried to replicate life the way Celmins did, in its exactitude, down to the finest detail. But I did think there was something important, maybe even necessary, in trying to make something that depicted, even if not life as it was, then life as how it felt"). This is electrifying. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert & Co. (Jan.)
Booklist Review
Christine weathers a series of disconcerting encounters while on a cross-country tour for her first novel, a lacerating, partly autobiographical tale about a young woman artist and graduate student enraged in the wake of a deeply damaging affair with an art professor. Shaken by the book's detonation of her relationship with a graphic designer, she senses that her novel is also bringing her back into the magnetic field of the "old painter." The intricately intriguing chapters in the first half of Pham's reflective debut novel are subtly aligned with such painters as Vija Celmins, Edward Hopper, and Agnes Martin as Pham draws on her experiences as a visual artist and the critical acumen that shaped her bravura first book, Pop Song (2021), a memoir-in-essays. Pham gives her conflicted, lonely, acutely observant and analytical protagonist the same sort of exquisite sensitivity. As Christine endures strange situations and painful revelations, she questions the practice and meaning of art, the solace of writing, and the dangerously porous border between life and fiction. When she ends up on the coast of Maine with her former mentor, she faces ever starker dilemmas. Christine hoped that her novel would be "striking, fearsome, and beautiful." Discipline, a brilliant, entrancing, and provocative mirror-within-mirrors tale of art, story, and power, is all that and more.
Kirkus Book Review
An author upends her book tour to confront the man who changed her life. Pham's astute debut novel follows first-time author Christine on her book tour. When she receives an anonymous email ("That's not how I remember it"), she immediately knows it's her former art professor, Richard. After a decade of no contact, the email sends her spiraling. She can't believe he's read her autofictional, if exaggerated, novel, in which he was the inspiration for the villain. Cleaved into two parts, the novel's first half follows Christine as she connects with strangers and estranged people from her past on tour stops. In a particularly beautiful and evocative chapter, Christine reunites with her former classmate and friend Frances. Upon discovering that she's given up painting, Frances asks Christine: "Isn't it painful?....To abandon a medium. There are so many things I can't say any other way." This conversation--imbued with their charged history of intimacy and competitiveness--allows Christine to begin to grapple with her own art: what she created in the past, what she creates now, and what she may create in the future. The novel's second half takes her to a remote island off the coast of Maine when she accepts Richard's invitation to come to his home. When she arrives, Christine finds herself shocked by Richard's rapid aging ("the decade that seems to have collapsed in an instant"). The pain of the past hangs heavy in the air around both of them. Despite herself, Christine feels an uncomfortable mix of fury and pity toward him as they begin to slowly and painfully address the wound at the center of their relationship. The novel simmers with tension and tenderness as Christine ponders the past and comes to terms with the present. Pham's lithe prose is especially on display in her musings about love, intimacy, power, art, writing, survival, and agency. A quietly elegant debut from a writer with great promise. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
TextPublisher: New York : Random House, [2026]Edition: First editionDescription: 210 pages ; 22 cmContent type: