The Alibi Breakfast

Burnt-out novelist Maurice Locksley confronts writer's block, a midlife crisis and his wife's infidelity in this tender, healing story of renewal and emotional growth. Last seen as an arrogant gadabout in Duberstein's 1987 debut, The Marriage Hearse, Maurice is now a wry, literate, ironically detached observer of his unmoored life ``in the Pennsylvania countryside'' and of Kim, his cheating playwright wife who has decamped to San Francisco. Their kids are growing up fast: sixth-grader Ben is writing a novel; Sadie, age 20, has brought home her Parisian boyfriend; Will, a forestry student, gets his girlfriend pregnant. Maurice bonds with his two sons by building a shack with them in the woods. Upon his wife's return, secrets spill out on both sides, and a touching epistolary chapter signals a turnaround in their relationship as each family member recognizes the wounds he or she has inflicted on one another. Duberstein's quicksilver prose adroitly voices the anxieties of a sensitive man who uses self-deprecating humor to plumb his ``shifting perception of the past,'' and the redemptive power of art and love. (May)