In Troubled Waters CL

Mix wisdom, compassion, humor, a true gift for pacing and telling a story and the ability to explore a highly charged subject with insight and candor, and you have some of the components Coyle brings to this fully satisfying novel, her second after the highly praised The Kneeling Bus . Set in central Florida, it features a 91-year-old man whose life has been tainted by the racism of the South into which he was born, and who faces his death with a deeply shameful memory still unexorcised. When Tom Glover was a boy, his parents informally adopted an orphaned black youngster named Lucky Apple, from whom Tom became inseparable. When Tom was a teenager, his father ended that relationship in a brutal act that catapulted Lucky out of the family and on his way to a horrible death. The incident turned Glover into the man he became: mean, crotchety, a bully to his late wife and daughter. That daughter, now 69, has moved back home with her gentle husband, Paul, suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Glover impulsively asks two teenagers--one of them black--to escort Paul to fish in the small lake beyond their yard. But to his growing dismay, he realizes that the overt racism of his youth has been supplanted by thinly veiled hypocrisy that covers bigotry with social finesse. His well-intentioned act makes Glover and his family outcasts, and only an act of quiet heroism on Glover's part allows him finally to atone for his past. Coyle's portrayal of the indomitable Glover is beautifully nuanced. She resists the temptation to make him less cantankerous and sharp-tongued and more lovable, yet he earns the reader's respect and understanding. The other characters, too, are portrayed with fidelity to human nature and a tolerance for foibles. Coyle's economical prose can deliver an astringent phrase, an eloquent image and a witty quip all in one sentence. Her telescopic eye and feeling heart mark her as a novelist of mature talent. (Apr.)