Boomfell

Charlie Boomfell, a Massachusetts real estate agent, onetime college teacher and failed epic poet, suspects that life is a lonely journey into hopelessness, and marriage either a stupor or a form of sickness. Yet for all Charlie's moody ruminations, this cadenced and lusty first novel is exhilarating. Boomfell's wife, Valerie, makes a chance confession that she once had an affair with his ex-teaching colleague, Eliot Singer. Now a divorced, suicidal English professor in Toronto, Singer is going to pieces over a young woman who wants to abort their child-to-be. He suddenly turns up on the Boomfells' doorstep, throwing their household into emotional chaos as past affairs are remembered, old dreams and longings revived. The narrative is spiced with free-associational monologues which bring traumas to the surface and, fortunately, also advance the plot. The overall effect is celebratory, a hard-won reaffirmation of life's unmappable possibilities. (June)