From Publishers Weekly
Stone's shortest novel, and his first in five years (after Damascus Gate, 1998), is a tight, brilliantly observed tale of one man's moral dissolution. Michael Ahearn is a respected professor of literature at a small college in the upper Midwest, with a lovely wife and 12-year-old son, but a vague dissatisfaction gnaws at him, exacerbated by a frightening incident while deer hunting and the near-death of his son from exposure. When Michael meets a new professor, the beautiful and electrifying Lara Purcell, he falls under her spell and launches an affair, endangering his marriage and his relationship with his son. At Lara's prompting, Michael travels with her to her Caribbean island home of St. Trinity, a nation rife with political violence, where Lara hopes to repossess the soul she believes has been captured by a voodoo goddess. The narrative undergoes a tonal shift on the troubled, threatening island, with events unfolding in a more intense, then nearly hallucinatory way, especially as Michael is himself possessed during a voodoo ceremony in which Lara hopes to reclaim her soul. A brief return to the U.S. mainland closes the novel on a somber note. All of Stone's characters here are etched in the acid of hard truth, with Stone probing deep-particularly into Michael, a sensitive, at times courageous man whose lust for the divine, for transcendence or salvation, is spoiled by a self-deception and self-indulgence that lead him astray and finally turn his life to ash. This is a novel of bold prose and subtle perceptions, a small, hard gem from a master writer.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
College professor, father, and middling husband, Michael Ahearn successfully holds himself at a safe distance from emotion. In his search for that elusive something to give his life meaning, he leaves the dreary comforts of home and family for the Caribbean and an exotic woman, where he finds himself in the midst of a fever-dream filled with political, spiritual, and emotional chaos, and an earthy, brooding eroticism. As Michael struggles with his obsession, narrator Arliss Howard captures his moral and emotional dilemma, creating an intensity bordering on delirium. He is less successful at capturing believable French or Caribbean accents, how-ever, stretching credibility in dialogue exchanges. Even so, Stone's beautifully crafted look into an ordinary man's soul pits the intellectual against the spiritual against the erotic, and the listener wins. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio Cassette
edition.
