Open Water

Although it deals with pain and dying, this absorbing new novel by Flook (Reckless Wedding), with its three bedeviled protagonists, proves full of verve. Deliciously oddball Rennie Hopkins, a wraith with white hair flying, stockpiles a candy store's worth of high-tech painkillers to ease her cancer agony. Soon she's sharing pills and suppositories with her trouble-prone stepson, Willis Pratt. Just discharged from the Navy as psychologically unfit, Willis has arrived home with a broken wrist (which gets excruciatingly rebroken). Then newly divorced Holly Temple, on probation for having set fire to her unfaithful husband's bed, moves in next door, trying to patch together her shattered life. With a natural affinity for one another, Willis and Holly soon become lovers; both hover around Rennie. Meanwhile, Willis and his goofy buddy Fritz engage in bizarre criminal deals (such as delivering rare exotic birds to a ``smut king'') in order to build up a fund for Rennie to ensure that she can stay in her house by the sea (her smarmy son, Munro, is trying to hustle her into a home for the terminally ill). Setting the novel in Newport, R.I., Flook incorporates the sea as a potent presence, using boating and fishing as significant scene and plot elements to steer her story gracefully and with humor to its satisfying conclusion. (Jan.)