This Time Last Year

An intricate approach to that most gothic of horrors, the death of a child, underpins this fascinating but eventually frustrating novel by Hobbie (Boomfell). Professor and critic Henry Ash arrives at the empty Vermont summer house of his sister-in-law, Mary Underhill, ""because I believed that a period of self-imposed isolation would provoke me to become productive again."" Mary has remained in Boston, unable to return to the place where her husband, Fitz, died unexpectedly the previous summer. Henry's second wife, Elizabeth, is touring Britain with a friend to get some distance from the central problem of the Ash marriage: Henry's inability to resume life after the death of his 20-ish daughter from cancer two years earlier. Left on his own, Henry starts to write about Whitman, Melville and Dickinson, whom he calls ""the three great loners."" After a frustrating encounter with a neighbor whose own losses have made her a dervish of need, grief and misplaced energy, Henry abandons writing and, in one of the novel's many heavily symbolic acts, starts to rebuild the stone wall around the hundred acres of land Mary owns. When Henry discovers the diary Fitz kept during the last few months of his life, he is both appalled and inspired. He incorporates Fitz's memoir into his own record of his summer in Vermont and reaches a contingent resolution, proved ironic by a tragic event that soon follows. The considerable delights of this book are Hobbie's supple prose and the intelligent references to American literature. Henry, however, is as wooden and burnt-out as his surname suggests, and it falls to other characters to experience a more believable and touching redemption. Rights: Donadio and Ashworth. (Mar.) FYI: Hobbie wrote Being Brett, a memoir of his daughter's death from Hodgkin's disease.