Remember Me

Lipsett's ( Out of Danger ) latest novel focuses on a family deformed by grief and arrested mourning. In the first chapter, Nancy, 34 and the mother of four small children, faces terminal cancer. Each successive chapter, set from eight to 12 years after Nancy's death, focuses on a member of the household or neighborhood. Nancy's widower, Maury, can't even speak of his wife, instead isolating himself in his work and attacking his children's emotional problems with businesslike solutions; the sympathetic housekeeper is fired when she tells Maury, ``These children's mother--she's flying around this place everywhere trying to get in. And she can't do it. . . . There's no welcome for her at all.'' The eldest, Lernie, drowns while still in her teens, her head clouded by the prescription drugs so abundantly supplied at home. Lernie's death leaves her sister racked by guilt and a brother unable to talk. Only after these new tragedies is it revealed that Nancy had committed suicide, that Maury considers her a ``monster'' who turned her family into a ``pain machine.'' Although Lipsett's sense of detail is unerring, her characters are never fully individuated and verge on the stereotypical, so that the reader, unlike Nancy's bereaved family, remains untouched. (May)