"Prickly" Iphegenia Julia Esker, a math teacher at a private Brooklyn high school, is the guarded figure at the heart of this accomplished, lovingly crafted and somewhat suffocating novel by Cohen, whose previous books include the novel Heat Lightning
and the poignant memoir Train Go Sorry. Esker (she goes by her last name) begins tutoring a brilliant and potentially troubled math student at home after Ann James's fall from school bleachers ("I was kind of nudged from the inside") leaves her wheelchair-bound with two broken heels. Ann adores her teacher and wants her father, the kindly, semimarried restaurant owner, Wally James, and Esker to get acquainted. Though Esker has lived a hermitlike existence for nine years, ever since her beloved Albert Rose, then 22, married the girl his family expected him to, Wally is able to get past Esker's defenses and make her, momentarily anyway, "baskingly, destabilizingly happy" in this odd tale of love and loneliness. As if Esker's natural resistance to happiness weren't enough, the Prospect School frowns on her nascent relationship with Wally, and Wally's wife (and Ann's mother), who left three years ago to act in independent films, visits at Christmas. But this slim novel is short on plot, which leaves Cohen room for enchantingly poetic observations and romantic similes, a sustained metaphor of physical injury, and characters who compulsively take their own emotional temperature. Small gestures carry great weight, and images and details reverberate throughout, as tension builds, not organically from situations, but from Cohen's descriptive layering. One wishes her characters—especially Esker—would stop thinking so much about how to live and just start doing it. (May 12)
