Without

Appropriately titled, Lipkin's second novel, after Untitled (a skier), is best described by what it lacks: exposition and narrative. Set in Tokyo, this slim, minimalist volume leans heavily on oblique dialogue, condensing enormous amounts of anguish into brief exchanges between various members of the Tanaka family and their friends. This anguish is not always easy to share. By withholding the fundamentals of syntax from the narrative (""These waves whose movements, their return, their sounds""), Lipkin simulates the fragmented experience of living alone, of being divorced, of outliving a loved one and, at the same time, sacrifices easy comprehension to the novel's airless atmosphere. Fortunately, Lipkin appends a family tree to the novel; without it, the reader would have had little chance of discerning one character from another. Some want to get married, some shun marriage, some marry and watch their marriages fall apart, yet we spend so much time thumbing back to the family tree for context that these ghostly personalities begin to blur. Without development, their lives remain (it seems, intentionally) inaccessible, overheard as if from a distance. (June)