"One side of Nia is a logical yet heartbroken person who has never let go of an old pain, while the other side is a sensual woman who will not let her rest."
I jotted that down around hour three, grading forgotten on my lap, Denise already asleep beside me. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing—show the iceberg, not the water. Dickey does something similar here, except his iceberg is desire, and the water is everything Nia Simone Bijou tells herself about why she's diving in.
The Gemini Problem (And Why It Works)
Let's talk about what the author is really saying. Dickey structures this entire novel around duality—Nia's Trinidadian roots versus her American life, her intellectual self versus her sensual self, the woman who wants commitment versus the one who craves freedom. It's not subtle. Dickey practically announces it. But here's the thing: that transparency becomes its own kind of honesty.
Nia is pretentious. She quotes literature, she overthinks, she's self-involved in ways that would make my juniors roll their eyes. And yet. There's something painfully real about a woman intellectualizing her way through desire because feeling it directly is too terrifying. I've taught Madame Bovary for two decades. I know this archetype. Corrections explores that same territory—characters who intellectualize their way through desire because confronting it directly would mean admitting something they're not ready to face. But Dickey writes Nia with a specificity that lifts her beyond the trope—she's not just any restless woman, she's this particular restless woman, carrying this particular old wound, making these particular choices in sweltering Atlanta July heat.
The prose deserves to be savored. Dickey was a New York Times bestseller twenty-nine times over for a reason. His sentences have rhythm, a musical quality that works especially well in audio. When Nia describes her lovers—and she describes them extensively—there's a lushness to the language that feels deliberate, almost ceremonial.
Susan Spain's Diary Approach
Spain narrates this like she's reading Nia's private journal aloud, which is exactly right for first-person intimacy but creates an interesting tension with the explicit content. There's a slight holding back—a detachment that some listeners found frustrating in the erotic scenes. I actually think it works. Nia herself is holding back, intellectualizing, observing herself from a distance even in her most vulnerable moments. Spain's restraint mirrors that.
She changes her voice for different characters, giving Nia's various lovers distinct textures without ever fully becoming them. It's still clearly Nia telling us about these people, filtering them through her perception. Spain understands that pause is punctuation—she uses silence well, letting moments breathe.
But I'll be honest. If you're coming to this expecting full-throttle erotic audiobook performance, you might feel cheated. Spain is emotionally present but not... consumed. Whether that's a flaw or a feature depends entirely on what you want from the experience.
Where the Pacing Stumbles
Fifteen hours is a commitment. And somewhere around the middle third, I started to feel it. The sexual encounters begin to blur together, and Nia's self-analysis—sharp at first—becomes repetitive. There's a subplot involving twins and a tragic love story that Dickey weaves through, and honestly, I wanted more of that. The moments when Nia confronts actual consequences, actual pain, are the book's strongest. The buildup to those moments sometimes drags. Interestings has that same deliberate accumulation—the weight of choices compounding over time until you feel the full emotional impact.
My students would hate this. They'd call it slow. They'd skim. (Some reviewers admitted to doing exactly that.) But I think Dickey is doing something intentional—he's making you feel the weight of Nia's choices, the accumulation of pleasure that starts to feel less like freedom and more like compulsion. The prose deserves to be savored, but that doesn't mean every passage earns its length.
Who This Is (And Isn't) For
If you loved Zane's work but wanted more literary ambition, this is its spiritual successor. Dickey writes explicit content with the vocabulary and structural awareness of someone who's read widely and thought deeply about desire as a subject, not just a sensation.
Skip this if you need fast pacing, you're uncomfortable with graphic sexual content, or you find self-reflective protagonists insufferable. Nia will test your patience if you're not willing to meet her on her own terms.
This is absolutely a focused listening experience. I tried it during a faculty meeting once—Principal Martinez was discussing budget allocations—and immediately realized I was either going to miss important plot development or important budget information. (I chose the plot. The budget will be fine.)
Mr. Williams's Final Grade
Dickey died in 2021, and there's something bittersweet about listening to his work now, knowing this voice is finite. He wrote twenty-nine novels. He understood desire as few authors do—not just the physical act but the psychology around it, the stories we tell ourselves, the ways pleasure and pain intertwine.
This isn't his best work. But it's ambitious, it's honest about female sexuality in ways that still feel rare, and Susan Spain delivers it with the kind of careful attention the material deserves. At 1.0x speed, obviously. The author chose those words.
