Jumping the Green

The eponymous phrase ""jumping the green"" is a kind of pre-emptive strike of derring-do, ""like landing before you actually leap, leaving a room before the door opens, anticipating life before it happens."" Before Louise Goldblum, the youngest of the five Goldblum children, is out of diapers, she can instinctively sidestep the bits of broken life around the house--the glass, pottery, and furniture that are her parents' weapons against each other. By the time she is 11, she is making of these shards ""strange"" and ""magnificent structures,"" displaying early the artistic talent that will make her a rising star in San Francisco art circles as the novel unfolds. Her sister, Esther, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, has been mysteriously killed in a local motel. In search of an epiphany or maybe just some peace, Louise takes up with Zeke Heirholm, a photographer who will lead her as far as she will let him into a world of sexual and physical violence and bondage. Esther had been the most daring of the Goldblum litter in her attempts to escape their gene pool and homestead in Bay Area suburbia, from her addiction to drugs and to sexual experiments at the age of 12 with her boyfriend Danny Franconi, to her reckless professional escapades after his suicide. Eddie Goldblum, the oldest sibling, challenged the ethics of his Wall Street firm and was sent home--very nearly in a body bag. The ambitious Martin became a research scientist, perhaps avenging the death sentences he had passed on hundreds of animals in his childhood as an amateur taxonomist. Only Mary, with her renegade gentleness, patience and button-down-husband, seems out of place. In this provocative first novel, Schwartz gracefully reveals Louise's struggle to comprehend her identity--as an artist, and as a Goldblum. Flashback chapters infuse the plot with a page-turning momentum, without sacrificing the elegance of Louise's gradually more penetrating introspection. (Oct.)