From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. William Moreland, the 47-year-old New York psychoanalyst at the center of Harrison's sixth novel, has a family that's awash in betrayals. Will's father, a retired veterinarian turned photographer, is having an affair with the owner of his gallery. Will's brother, Mitchell, a long-distance swimmer with "a name as recognizable as that of, say, Lance Armstrong or Tiger Woods," is estranged from the family. And ever since Will's 12-year-old son died three years ago in a boating accident, his wife, Carole, has been emotionally and sexually distant. All these wounds pucker open when Will attends his college reunion and runs into a statuesque ex-girlfriend who left him 25 years ago when she may or may not have been pregnant with his child. That past betrayal becomes entangled with the others in Will's life and leads to further transgressions and revelations. Given the steamy, soap-operatic nature of this plot, it's remarkable how Harrison renders it emotionally plausible, in sinuous, sensitive and often funny prose, exposing the raunchiness of sex and the "obscene" nature of mortality. Will's profession as an analyst seems too convenient—allowing Harrison to analyze her own novel through the voice of her main character—but this is a pardonable flaw in a book so juicy and intelligent.
(July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Harrison is a high-wire memoirist and a probing and inventive novelist. Her sixth novel, an intoxicating work of psychosexual suspense, portrays a New York family wracked by tragedy, some of it obvious--the accidental drowning of a young boy--much hidden. Harrison writes commandingly from a male psychologist's point of view, and much of the heady power of this harrowing tale is rooted in the fact that none of Will's powers as a perceptive therapist help him understand how his stoic wife copes with their son's death, or recognize that secrets are being kept from him. Yet Will's instincts are sharp. He wonders if the 24-year-old daughter of an old girlfriend is his. He is unnerved by his retired veterinarian father's transformation into a celebrated photographer. He obsesses about the subterranean, perhaps malevolent, aspects of his relationship with his identical twin, Mitch, identical, that is, except for the port-wine stain that disfigures Mitch's face. A world-famous long-distance swimmer, Mitch has been estranged from his twin and their parents for 15 years, ever since Will got married. Will is finally pitched into crisis by a new patient, a stunningly audacious, spiked and tattooed, viciously intelligent, foul-mouthed, and sexually rampaging young woman. Harrison's dialogue is electrifying, the sophistication of her psychology is mesmerizing, and her characters, so astutely drawn, are bewitching.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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