From Amazon.com
In Anne Ursu's gracefully layered first novel,
Spilling Clarence, a fire at a psychopharmaceutical plant releases a yellow cloud of psychoactive chemicals into the air of a sleepy college town named Clarence. Disturbing effects begin to show up in the townspeople, especially in the residents--mainly former professors--of the cleverly named Sunny Shadows retirement home. They find themselves remembering events and people they had long forgotten, or revisiting their favorite memories to find that new details have been recovered, a few of which they would rather have kept suppressed. Happiness is only sometimes a side effect of these startling recollections. In some ways, the chemical spill speeds along emotional processes that are already a staple of contemporary fiction: recovered memory, the discovery of unexpected connections, and the confrontation of the past. Some readers may find Ursu's plot too cinematic, but she is never glib or opportunistic. Like a good theorist, she pursues her idea to its logical, often surprising conclusion in the life of each of her characters.
--Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
First novelist Ursu comes off as an Alice Hoffman wannabe who doesn't quite make the grade. Like Hoffman, she creates a small community here, the fictional Midwestern town of Clarence and describes a dramatic event that causes several characters to undergo life changes. When a leak at a psychopharmaceutical factory spills a drug called deletrium into the atmosphere, strange psychological reactions afflict Clarence's residents. One by one, they are traumatized by memories of the past that they had previously buried. Bernie Singer, a widowed psych professor at local Mansfield University, is forced to remember the auto accident that killed his wife and left him to raise alone his precocious daughter, Sophie, now nine years old. Bernie's mother, Madeline, a well-known novelist who is now blocked, is disturbed by memories of her relationship with her dead husband. Susannah Korbet, who works at Madeline's retirement home, must deal with her guilt about her mother's illness, while her fianc‚, a grad student whose specialty is memory studies, undergoes his own crisis. Ursu's what-if scenario is diverting to some degree, but the paint-by-numbers plot development soon becomes labored, and the relentlessly perky prose style calls attention to itself with too arch irony. The characters speak like robots who've never used a vernacular contraction, stiffly uttering "cannot" or "will not" or "do not" even in relaxed conversation, and the repetition of almost identical sentence patterns echoes the sing-song cadences of children's books. While the story is lightly engaging, Ursu never establishes the suspension of disbelief that Hoffman accomplishes with such dexterity.
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