THE BLUE BOWL

The sins of the father are visited on the sons in this emotionally resonant first novel by another member of the talented Minot clan. As in two of his siblings' novels, Minot portrays children scarred by their mother's untimely death and their father's alcoholism. Here the central character is Simon Curtis, an artist and drifter in his early 30s who has never surmounted the loss of his mother or outgrown an adolescent's egocentrism. Disgusted at his son's irresponsibility, his cold and remote father, a retired banker, has virtually disowned him. Simon mooches off his brother and sisters and lives in one of his father's two New England houses, despite being ordered not to do so. Now Simon has sneaked back home and spent a surreptitious week in the Manchester. Mass., house—avoiding his father, stealing food from the refrigerator, watching TV on low volume. Then his father is found dead in the basement. Indicted for murder, Simon becomes the center of a media circus, and his siblings gather to protect him. Minot takes risks in making Simon an essentially unappealing character—nerdy, needy, socially inept, irritatingly eccentric. Yet his psychological portrait of Simon's muddled perception of the world is inspired, as is his use of vigorous and arresting images to conjure scene, atmosphere and personality. If some stream of consciousness passages are gnarled and full of verbal disfluencies (the ubiquitous use of like ), if the plot's chronological jigsaw puzzle is an impediment to easy reading (though it contributes to rising suspense) and if the surprising denouement raises its own questions, Minot's novel succeeds as an involving portrait of a dysfunctional family. Agent, Melanie Jackson. (Apr. 2)

Forecast :Readers of Susan Minot ( Monkeys and Evening) and Eliza Minot ( The Tiny One) will be drawn to this latest fictional perspective. The novel will stand on its own, however, as a distinctive portrayal of an emotionally maimed man brought into jarring contact with terrifying reality.