In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, May 24, featuring program alum Vanessa Cuti and her debut novel The Tip Line (Crooked Lane, 2023) in conversation with her cohort member Alison Fairbrother (author of The Catch, Random House, 2022), alum Nora Decter looks at Vanessa’s masterful narration.
All first-person narrators are unreliable, I tell my students every semester, as the writing teachers of yore once told me. It’s a literary foregone conclusion: no one who tells their own story can be trusted.
Still, it’s a quality I don’t think we laud enough in fiction, this unreliability, perhaps because it’s so universally human a trait we don’t recognize the skill involved in getting it on the page.
Vanessa Cuti’s debut novel The Tip Line offers readers a daring example of the flexibility of first-person, calling to mind psychological thrillers heavy on the literary gravitas like Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or Death in Her Hands, whose first-person narrators are richly weird, the stories they tell all the more riveting for that weirdness. Maybe it was The Tip Line’s seaside setting, but I was also reminded of Ann Quin’s Berg, the so-called “working class Virginia Woolf”—something about the particular dark pitch Quin and Cuti give their subject matter.
All of this to say that with The Tip Line, Cuti has given us the elements of a crime thriller (murdered sex workers, shady cops), added a marriage plot, and then filtered it through a consciousness that genuinely confounds expectations. At thirty years old, our first-person narrator Virginia Carey is unmarried and unemployed, a little behind on her life plan, as her mother would say. When she accepts a job at the local police headquarters, it seems she’s found a solution to both problems. But it’s not the conventional admin job Virginia expected—instead she’s answering a tip line, fielding calls mostly from people accusing their neighbors of being drug lords. Nor is it really a conventional place to find a husband, at least not the way Virginia goes about it. But the setting suits her nature: composed on the surface, with something secret brewing underneath. “Honestly,” she says, early in the book, “I only wanted to stop looking. I could not understand why it was so hard. And so, here we are. The police department.”
In another early passage Cuti gives us a key to understanding Virginia’s motives. Over several pages, Virginia explains her relationship history, how she ended up unmarried at thirty, concluding, “I was always trying to find that little place of darkness in a man. So that when we were quiet, lying in bed, just before or just after, our little darknesses matched up.”
Virginia’s internal monologue is delivered in a frank, terse tone and we are brought deep into her daydreams, as she fantasizes first about Charlie, a detective, and then later Declan Brady, the chief of police. These fantasies fool us until we adjust to the frequency with which Virginia slips into them. “Not yet. Keep going,” she tells herself after spinning out a scene in her head between her and Charlie. “There were dozens of these,” she says, “These were just a few.”
Virginia is reliable in her unreliability, which is embodied by the increasingly questionable decisions she makes as the plot of the novel progresses. This is especially apparent in her dealings with Verona, the tip line caller who leads police to the bodies of the murdered women on the beach. Verona almost seems a shadow version of Virginia at the other end of the phone. They have in common their relative youth, beauty and the power found in that. But it’s Verona, a sex worker, who is honest, and Virginia who can’t really be trusted. In a remarkably written sequence of scenes, Virginia’s attention shifts from Charlie, the detective she is on the cusp of courting, to Brady, the police chief. Soon Virginia begins to suspect the killer Verona is describing sounds a lot like Brady, and she is drawn even closer to him. Readers remember the earlier passage about wanting a man whose dark spots matched her own. “Those spots—ticking constantly like quartz within us—would be carefully contained, encapsulated, by all the rest of the virtue surrounding them. We were normal people, good people, and we would keep each other’s dark spots from growing, from taking over. This is what relationships were for. What marriages were for.”
Neither the narrative nor Virginia are reliably what they seem. Yes, there are murdered sex workers, but the mystery of who kills them, like the real life Gilgo beach serial murders that inspired the plot, remains unsolved by the book’s end. Yes, Virginia wants a husband, but not for the conventional reasons her friends and family want her to find one.
But for writers, The Tip Line offers a master class in unreliable narration. The way Cuti writes Virginia is, in the end, even more thrilling than the love affair or the dead girls on the beach.
Nora Decter is a writer and teacher from Winnipeg, Canada. She has an MFA in creative writing from Stony Brook University and she was a BookEnds fellow in 2020-2021. Her BookEnds novel What’s Not Mine is forthcoming from ECW Press in April 2024.