Walking Through Mirrors

Jackson follows his debut (The View from Here, 1997) with this story of a New York photographer who returns reluctantly to his Louisiana roots for his father's funeral. Abandoned by his father (whose name we learn only at the novel's end) for 15 years, Jeremy Bishop has rejected all of his overtures and pleas for forgiveness. Back in the bosom of his loving, opinionated extended family (most notably the grandmother and aunt who raised him after his mother died and his father left home to start a new family with another woman), Jeremy now blames his own antagonism and self-absorption for keeping him and his father apart. In Jeremy's hometown of Elsewhere, La., we journey with him through old reunions with friends, scarring sexual experiences, fear of familial rejection and the lingering sense of loss that he feels for the mother he never knew. As moving as this journey is, Jeremy's emotions, portrayed with more vigor than subtlety, upstage everyone around him, reduce the impact of the other characters' conundrums and dilute the power of Jackson's work as a whole. Nevertheless, the novel succeeds in blending a bildungsroman with a saga of loss, resulting in a clever rumination on the difficult, inherent complexities of the father-son relationship. Author tour. (Oct.)