Zeena

Keen evocation of a psychological landscape and a fully realized setting highlight this retelling of Edith Wharton's classic Ethan Frome. At home with New England's forbidding beauties and their shaping effect on the Yankee character, Cooke (Complicity) gives us the story from an unexpected point of view--that of Ethan's shrewish wife, Zenobia. Zenobia, or Zeena, is a shy, sheltered but strong soul who, because she is plain and lacks social savvy, has almost convinced herself that she will never have a husband and family. She has her dreams, though--to escape her father's house and make a life for herself as a successor to her adored, late mother, a healer. She gets her chance in a call to care for her distant cousin Beatrice on an isolated farm. When Zeena meets Belle's son, Ethan, they argue but eventually connect and wed in laconic Yankee style. Instead of telling the story of Ethan's subsequent affair with Mattie, the hired girl, however, Cooke reveals his earlier indiscretion with a local girl, Rebekah Varnum--an affair that was doomed because Rebekah's family considered her above Ethan's station. This signal event, and the horrendous secret it enforces upon Zeena, help explain the pain and disappointment of the following years, including those spent taking care of Mattie, crippled in the accident that is the denouement of Wharton's novel. While not without inconsistencies, the narrative is poignant and achieves an appropriately muted catharsis at the end. (Oct. )