The Shadow of Desire

Four years after her searing first novel, Not the End of the World, Stowe weighs in with a sharp and ultimately moving tale of a family and its buried psychological sins and unaddressed tragedies. Ginger Moore, a 38-year-old divorced academic, slogs her way out of New York City, where she's often the butt of her stand-up comedian lover's jokes (""I go to bed with my girlfriend... and wake up with Alistair Cooke""), and drives to Michigan for a family Christmas. Virginia, Ginger's mother, is a bitter alcoholic; Poppy, her dad, is pathologically withdrawn; Cease, her brother, is a whirlpool of rage; and Ginger, unhappy with her own life, habitually flees into the biographies she writes. This is a family whose Yuletide traditions include watching Pycho. Harrowing confessions, ballistic verbal abuse and acts of violence are the only remaining recourse with enough thermal power to blast these passive and benumbed souls out of their intricate depressions, torpors and frustrations. What made Virginia an alcoholic, Poppy oblivious, Cease so cruel and Ginger chronically unsatisfied with herself? Were it not for Stowe's evolved sense of irony, the process of finding out could have been overwhelmingly depressing. But Stowe uses comedy to control the otherwise relentless pathos. And Ginger-cursed with a chorus-like super-ego in her head that includes Jonathan Edwards, H.L. Mencken and her own mother-is a savvy guide, smart enough to know that her book-smarts won't save her. (June)