Blueprints

A 40-something drifter who abuses drugs and drink and still can't commit to men and career, Emery Lannier leaves San Francisco for an unnamed inland city to briefly visit and make some sort of peace with that almighty, irresponsible pair she blames for messing up her life: her parents. But her stay is extended indefinitely after her mother, Nina, also a drunk, burns down the house during a binge. Holed up in a hunting lodge on a empty stretch of land owned by her brother, Drew, Emery baby-sits her parents, Frank and Nina, haunted by memories of their willful indifference to her and Drew as they grew up, her father's stoniness and spouting of useless, esoteric information, her mother's madness. Nina confused the teenager Emery with an imaginary neighbor, whom she called Mrs. White; now her mother thinks Emery is Julia, Emery's younger sister who died in Vietnam, and complains to ``Julia'' about the worthless Drew and Emery. Emery must also confront confusing feelings she abides for a lover she's been leaving for the last 25 years as well as for a Vietnam veteran she's just met, a lost soul who's spooked by the Lanniers. Trapped in the past, these self-absorbed characters and their fractured experiences make for a dreary novel, turgid with pretentious philosophizing. Vogan wrote Loss of Flight. (Sept.)