I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas

Gilchrist ( Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle ) brings back familiar characters in three linked, deeply perceptive novellas focusing on the Hand family of Charlotte, N.C. In ``Winter'' famed novelist Anna Hand, ill with cancer, gives her last energies to save her adored young niece Jessie from her neurotic mother, Sheila, taking a dangerous journey to Turkey to secure proof that Sheila is an unfit parent. In ``De Havilland Hand,'' Anna's other niece surfaces, the headstrong half-Cherokee Olivia, child of Daniel Hand's idyllic hippie-period marriage to the now dead Summer Deer. Both Jessie and Olivia confront their baffled father, aging Daniel, and learn to coexist. ``A Summer in Maine'' gathers a houseful of kinfolk and close acquaintances to recover Anna's literary papers. Instead they carry on their ``junky troubled life'' of lovemaking and wrangling, in a welter of voices, the most humane being that of the black servant Traceleen. Gilchrist brilliantly captures the intimate accents and rhythms of a family under stress. (Oct.)