cover image SELAH'S BED

SELAH'S BED

Jenoyne Adams, . . Free Press, $23 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-684-87353-4

Selah Wells, a successful photographer, is an emotionally remote and sexually voracious woman. Though she loves her minister husband, Parker, she is also regularly unfaithful to him. Adams (Resurrecting Mingus) weaves the story of Selah's childhood with that of her troubled marriage. The girl grew up with a neglectful and promiscuous mother, an absent father and a grandmother who slowly became addicted to painkillers. Selah is raped by a friend's brother at 13, and her strong spirit and precocious sexuality are sharply reined in by this abrupt introduction to adulthood. As she grows up, Selah finds a refuge from the emotional chaos of her youth in photography. It gives her power over her male subjects and allows her to foil their expectations by refusing to sleep with them. Yet when she falls in love for the first time with one of her clients, the tensions in her marriage come to a head. Selah's relationships with Parker and the other men in her life are compelling, but the melodramatic events of her childhood are familiar abuse story staples, and Adams draws overly obvious connections between these traumas and her adult emotional life. Though Adams writes fluidly, with flashes of wit (she describes Selah as "taking the time not to put on underwear" when she gets ready to do a photo shoot), Selah remains little more than a collection of socially defined traits, never quite gelling into a vivid, original personality. Agent, Jim Levine. (Feb. 5)