Central Square

It is Cambridge, Mass., in November, when ""the sky turns leaden and the clocks have been set back, the larger body dies and the idea of the city becomes a memory, an accident of warm weather."" Into the Central Square of this hauntingly rendered hibernal wasteland, Packer (The Village of Waiting; The Half Man) leads four characters: Joe Amouzou, a black American who, returning from a year's stint in Africa, fakes an identity as an African magician and finds, to his own amazement, a surge of power in the disguise; Eric Barnes, a 37-year-old novelist in danger of being dropped from his publishing house for insufficient sales; his pregnant wife, Jane, whom Eric feels is too obsessed with the child in her womb; and Paula Vorhees, the classic other woman who hates the stereotype--she's 30, single, a therapist at loose ends. The affair between Eric and Paula endures for the space of a winter month, until Jane discovers it. In the meantime, Joe is becoming involved, almost unwittingly, with a local grassroots organization run by Paula's unctuous boss. Packer has a good feel for the sunlight-deficient lives of a typical New England winter, but the novel is more than a few deft portraits of selected urban existences. It is a graceful meditation on the moral longing and often doomed effort that go into reinventing oneself. (Oct.)