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She booked out of Dallas right after graduating from Walden Prep School at 16 and worked her way through New York’s Hunter College as a stripper at a Manhattan joint called The Doll House. Got your attention? OK, skip to the present, when 37-year-old Victoria Alexander, now living in SoHo, is the highly praised author of two novels: Smoking Hopes, which was published in ’96 and deals with life in an Upper East Side Japanese hostess club, and her most recent, Naked Singularity, which addresses the subject of euthanasia. Publishers Weekly calls the latter “gut-wrenching and eloquently written.” Nothing is ordinary about this rebellious and gifted writer who says the reason she left Dallas for New York was because “it’s easier for a nerd to fit in up here.”

Texas Books in Review,

“Daddy’s Girls” by Clay Reynolds

Naked Singularity by Victoria N. Alexander.

(Sag Harbor, NY: The Permanent Press, 2003. 208 pp. $24 cloth)

Dallas native Victoria Alexander’s second novel, Naked Singularity, examines the relationship of a marginalized daughter attempting to come to terms with the painful death of her father. Hali, the youngest daughter of David MacDonald, a moderately successful Dallas journalist, has made her life away from her father and family. Married to a wealthy artist and well established in New York City, Hali is pursing her doctorate in the philosophy of science when she receives word that her father, an inveterate pipe smoker, has been diagnosed with cancer of the throat and larynx. She returns home, perfunctorily at first, to offer titular and somewhat sentimental support as he goes through various treatments to shrink and possibly destroy the tumor. She hopes that his growing debilitation will be less a prelude to a painful loss than merely a bump in the smooth road her life has become.

Her visits home during this early stage of her father’s treatment bring her to a new awareness of his personality. She discovers how alike they are in some ways and yet how polarized they remain owing to her perception of him as a somewhat aloof and recalcitrant individual, given to drink, to battles wit her mother and his ex-wife over religion, and to a kind practical flippancy about life that she initially saw as shallow and lacking in philosophy. As they associate more closely with one another, discussing films, and arguing cosmology and metaphysics, though, she finds herself drawn to a closer understanding of this man who has had such an impact on making her who she is. Although he lacks the formal instruction in which she has so completely immersed herself, his views and conclusions make striking sense to her and tend to simplify that which she had previously seen as highly complex. Unlike her sisters, who are far more conventional in their lifestyles and achievements, Hali sees that she is very much her father’s daughter.

The realization is not entirely comfortable. As his cancer goes first into remission and then emerges more virulent and threatening than ever, she understand that he is dying, that he will die soon, and that his death will be both painful and to some extent humiliating for a man who has always been fiercely independent and self-sufficient. Initially, she tries to run away, to escape her responsibility to him, but this, she finally acknowledges, is no answer. Returning to Dallas, she is confronted with his recognition that he is dying and also with his decision to commit suicide rather than face a prolonged and pitiful end. He takes her into his confidence in the matter, but she soon realizes that his attempts are not going to succeed, for in spite of his protestations of agnosticism and an eagerness to accept death, he is afraid.

As she becomes closer and closer to this man who sired her, reared her, and now relies on her utterly, she comes to a deeper and almost shattering realization. Rather that being independent and free-willed, Hali finds herself alone and manipulated by emotions she cannot control. Her husband, Seth, a philandering dilettante who is far more interested in his own father’s death, in his art, and in his money than in what Hali is going through, provides no meaningful support. Referring to her as “Halibut” (a bottom-feeding fish), he seems constantly to be using her as some sort of prop, a necessary element of the perfect life of the artist he has created for himself. Her sisters, helpless in the face of their grief, become distractions to her purpose and offer no consolation. Her mother is only concerned about her ex-husband’s rejection of the church, and David’s second wife, Candice, devoted as she is to her husband and respectful as she is of Hali’s special relationship to him, becomes an impediment to her purpose.

Hali’s attempts to assist her father are ineffective, and she winds up enlisting the support of his nurse, a shady figure who clearly has more interest in Hali, in her money and her sexuality, than in any sense of compassion for David. Together they manage, at last, to ease her father out of his pain and out of this life. The consequences, though, become telling on her, not only from the potential threat represented by the nurse, but also on her view of herself.

This novel works well because of the way Hali’s character develops. At the outset, she is a highly confident “contemporary woman,” one who relies utterly on the epistemology of science and the certainty of physical reality. She has arranged her life and set her course on the predicate of her supreme self-confidence. She knows she is intelligent, talented, beautiful, and, thanks to her marriage, wealthy. She relies on her mind and her abilities to sustain her against any self-doubt or penetrating questions that might undermine her surety.

In a sense, this novel is about the “meltdown” of a singular personality, about the slow erosion of confidence in the face of a grim and harsh reality. Hali realizes that cold intellectualism cannot displace human emotion, cannot provide substantial answers to vague questions about life and death, and, more particularly, about love and compassion. This discovery ultimately leads her to questions that she cannot easily answer. And finally, it merely leaves her insecure and afraid.

Beautifully written, Naked Singularity effectively ties disparate philosophies together. Demonstrating that the relationship between the hardest, coldest picture of the universe and the inexplicable pattern of human life and the mysteries of the human heart is far more complex than any quick analysis can explain, it reveals something meaningful about the way our contemporary world works and demonstrates that, in the end, no matter how much we learn or think we know, we are still our fathers’ children.

Kirkus Reviews

Oct 1, 2002

A far cry from the hot-hostess high-jinks of Smoking Hopes (1996), Alexander’s first novel, this is a painfully personal tale of Daddy’s Little Girl come home to Texas to agonize over whether she should help him die quietly, thereby avoiding his gruesome end from throat cancer. Hali may be diminutive, but she’s no lightweight, being a PhD in teleology and a major babe besides. When she arrives on the scene from New York, however, where her “open” relationship with an artist on the cusp of fame has hit a rough patch, she`s already aware that she may have to fulfill a tough special role for the family. At first, there’s hope, as Dad reads optimism in his doctor’s evasions and the punishing therapy seems to be having its desired effect. Father and daughter discover a renewed appreciation for each other’s cosmological interests and similar philosophies. But not many months pass before a different scenario emerges: last-chance surgery is ruled out as the cancer spreads to his spinal column and Hali is at Dad’s bedside when he speaks privately to her of helping him out. Eventually, she agrees, and with the help of a muscle-bound drifter in nurse’s garb she becomes the family Kevorkian – except that Dad won’t die no matter how many drug cocktails they give him, and Hali and the nurse feel increasingly the tugs of a fatal attraction.

The emotions are raw at times, but there’s a cool tone of postmodern post-mortem throughout as well, raising hackles and sympathy from first to last.

Ethical Culture Review

A Novel Explores the Spectrum of Euthanasia
Reviewed by Kurt Johnson

“Death’s inevitability is the Great Teacher” tradition quotes the Buddha as saying. This novel confronts death with a similar passion. In Naked Singularity (“Your last metaphor for God was the Singularity” [p. 22]) Victoria Alexander examines and grapples with the conundrum of euthanasia.

The book’s subject is no surprise to those who know Ms. Alexander’s biography. A relatively recent PhD graduate, she has published scholarly work in literary criticism, science, and teleological philosophy (of teleology Webster says “the character…attributed to nature or natural processes of being directed toward an end or shaped by a purpose”).

The heroine of Naked Singularity is also a teleologist, as well as a woman with a tortured relationship with her father. Now dying, he has been source of her life’s greatest angst and inspiration. Fitting the teleological theme, this chimeric paternal relationship has predicated her other bonds with men, including both husband and lovers. She is both deeply intellectual and an extremely sexual being.

Into this fertile ground for story-telling– confronting questions of love, impermanence, betrayal, inevitable death, assisted death, the hopeful and the jaded– Dr. Alexander introduces the inward-most existential thoughts of her heroine (often fond or discordant remembrances of her father) italicized, and used to set-off, or break, portions of the storyline:

“I have often heard you say that a fatal action began when your father had yelled at your mother, Get in the car, and she had obeyed. …Easier to attribute death to the mysterious purpose of some greater power than think it might have been avoided”. (p. 44)

This device allows the author to introduce multiple-angled views on the question of euthanasia through the thought-struggles of her characters. In life, Dr. Alexander specializes in “mechanistic teleology” (wherein direction emerges from within–“in the rearview mirror all is determined, if not inevitable.” [p. 64]). Where has musing ended and the story line begun again? What is really real here? What has really happened? If I felt this way, how would I act?

In the story, of course, it is this dying father who expects this “courageous” “renegade” among his daughters to be the one to mercifully “snuff him out” when he has finally had enough. Can she? Will she? And, if so, who can she trust to help?– all questions by book’s-end rendered into a maze of philosophical alternatives left by Alexander, apparently on purpose, for the reader to sort out. Publishers Weekly found the book’s ending “barely believable” but perhaps that reviewer missed what may be Dr. Alexander’s precise point– that none of us can be exactly sure about what is true in our lives and none of can be exactly sure of what we might do if faced with such a request by one of our most loved ones.

Other reviewers have called this book “painful”, “raw”, “gut-wrenching”, “lurid” and “macabre”– yet also “profound”. Metaphorically, perhaps the best way to read this book is to simply bring your own baggage, get on the train, and see where it takes you. There is very little in the spectral question of assisted death that is not explored in this relatively short novel, which can be read in one sitting. One may feel quite blank by the time one has gotten to the end, but perhaps this is the point. As Dr. Alexander’s heroine muses to herself, hearkening back to the Big Bang:

“Old light, tired starlight, climbing out of the last planetary abyss, tell us what you know. What agency broke the primordial symmetry? Who gave us these frozen accidents, our laws? But there was no answer to the question because of the way it was posed. They failed to understand that a Naked Singularity would not be like a god at all, except in his absence. He would have no throne to squat upon, no object in view. He would be but a symbol, bubbling up in the rolling void. Nothing so grand as anti-entropic entities like you and I, builders, painters and celestial mapmakers”. (p. 92).

The reader is left to ponder whether the daughter’s acceptance of her father’s ultimate request would be entropic or anti-entropic after all, and, lastly, what could be measured of its grandeur.

Kurt Johnson is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture and the National Service Conference of the AEU. With a doctorate in evolutionary biology, he has published widely concerning conservation and ecological issues and is also active in inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. Originally in the Christian religious life, Dr. Johnson spent a year during that period working with dying children.

Review by Gerrit Henry

Alexander, Victoria N. Naked Singularity.The Permanent Press, 2003, Sag Harbor. 189 pp. One of the many dark beauties of Victoria N. Alexander’s new novel is that, not only is it the proverbial good read, it is also an aproverbially brilliant one. Alexander–holder of a Ph.D in English from CUNY, Graduate School–has dished up a heart-stoppingly beautiful heroine who holds similar degrees in teleology (the study of why) and she thinks, and writes, like a dream. Witness this sample from a soliloquy by Hali on death: “You had thought death would at least be romantic, but now you realize there is nothing to be thankful for–how vacuous, how colorless, how without pity, how without regard for your intentions . . . . ” This, from a piece of popular fiction, is almost asking too much in the matter of sheer, unabused style.

Unfortunately, both narrator and author have run up against that same ontically insurmountable obstacle as described above: Hali’s beloved father, former pipe fiend Dave MacDonald, is, as we join the proceedings, being slowly undone, in sickbed and out, by a gross cancer that proceeds from mere discomfort of the throat areas to grueling pain of the neck and head, a progression unforeseen by his bubble-brained doctors to the utter despair of this wife and three daughters, including Hali.

There’s darker to come. On one of her trips to Texas from New York–where Hali resides with her husband Seth, a slightly noble, thus not completely understanding, type–Hali’s father asks her, his youngest, if she will privately assist him in bringing about his death, before nature can take its grisly course. Hali–perhaps more to the reader’s surprise than her own–agrees, not wanting to see her father reduced to the level of disfigured effigy, long-suffering or short. ‘Tis a consummation, they both agree, devoutly to be wished, and brought about.

And full, it must be added, of misjudgments and misintentions, not so much on the part of Hali, but the tortured psyche of slim-hipped, drawling, East Texas night nurse they’re hired to while away Dave’s nocturnal hours. In ungracious cahoots with Hali, Thomas, as pictured by Alexander, does for euthanasia what Raskalnikov did for murder: Dave MacDonald is subjected to a steady stream of lethal drugs (injected through a feeding tube implanted in his stomach) including morphine, Valium, Vicodin, Dilaudid, even Nyquil–all without any effect except to plunge Hali’s father into one faux-coma after another.

At times, the coloring of the whole affair becomes so dark as to make us believe we’re in the midst of some whopper of a black comedy.  But as Dave’s wife and daughters begin to fall apart, singly and collectively, as Hali spends her afternoons running ten miles at a clip, and blackmail abruptly becomes more than a subtext, we begin to see far more clearly the true themes of Alexander’s novel: the savage intractability of life, equaled only by the dauntless superiority of death, the terrible malfeasance that seems to have brought all of it on, and the state of ontological vacuum resulting, with each as culpable as the next, and no one safe from death except death itself.

I’m not going to reveal the conclusion of Naked Singularity, except to wonder out loud if Hali is ever going to be free of Thomas, even with that noble Seth–noble, and newly nasty–standing by. I promised you a good read, and guarantee you’ll get it. But you’ll also get much more, much of it existentially inconvenient, much  more lagniappe for the soul.

Curled Up with a Good Book Review

Victoria N. Alexander’s first novel, Smoking Hopes, was published in 1996. Though it has been seven years, Naked Singularity is well worth the wait. Told in events current and taking place in flashbacks, Alexander takes the reader down an intriguing road loaded with questions and choices, none of them easy.

Hali is the youngest child of divorced parents; she has two sisters, and their past is dark and haunted. Growing up, her father was an abusive alcoholic and her mother was something of a loser; the girls were left to fend for themselves. But now, she, along with the rest of the family, is struggling with her father’s cancer. What the rest of the family does not know is that her father has asked her to help him commit suicide.

Of course it is not an easy decision to make. She hates driving him back and forth to the hospital for painful treatments, engaging in discussions about Shakespeare and beliefs. She cannot see why, if he is bound to die, that he should be forced live the rest of his days suffering. But when she learns that her father is afraid of dying, everything becomes that much more complicated. Unable to do it on her own, Hali looks to a nurse for help. And they soon learn that a mercy killing is not as easy as it sounds, and life spins out of control.

Alexander’s writing is poetic as she allows the reader to feel without telling them what it is they are supposed to be feeling. Naked Singularity is sad, touching and heartfelt, a taut story about love and living, hate and dying. I only hope fans of Victoria N. Alexander’s writing do not have to wait nearly another decade for more of her wonderful storytelling.