Absent a Miracle

Alice Fairweather, a Californian transplanted to the New York City suburbs with her Harvard-educated, Maine-born husband and their two precocious sons, undergoes a major transformation in Lehner's unpleasantly overstuffed latest. An unexpected visit from her husband's college roommate, Abelardo Llobet Carvajal, who is seeking to canonize his great aunt, sets Alice on a journey to Nicaragua. Although the author has imbued her characters with charming eccentricities—husband Waldo is an inventor with a fondness for limericks; one son, Henry, tends to speak in thesaurus-ese (“hypogeal” and “egregious”); the other son, Ezra, lives “fully in his sleep”; and Alice has an interest in dreams that parlays into a part-time radio hosting job where she interprets callers' dreams—there is a bewildering lack of depth and connection between the characters, who come across mainly as anthropomorphized collections of quirks. Add in an unwieldy plot that includes marital infidelity, dream interpretation, the exigencies of upper-crust life in Maine, the obstacles to canonization, Nicaraguan politics, coffee-bean farming, suicide, Catholic guilt, snow blindness and canine blood donation, and you've got something of an unholy mess that never quite pulls itself together. (Aug.)