The sophisticated interplay of conflicted faith and prosaic everyday life, and the clashes between inborn heritage and constructed love, are at the heart of this second novel by the author of the memorable A Blessing on the Moon. A middle-aged secular Jew raised in Texas, Charles Belski is a musicologist who searches for the secret to theology through the works and lives of various historical personalities: Wagner, Mahler, and Zeppo and Groucho Marx. A reluctant husband and father, Belski is also the first of his family to marry outside his religion. The Catholic background of his beautiful wife, Isabelle, is only one of a series of seemingly irreconcilable differences; underlying their marital tension is the disparity between their upbringings and their ways of looking at the world, including their disagreements regarding their daughter Franny's religious upbringing. Belski travels through the canyons of the Southwest with Isabelle to try and save their marriage and to Auschwitz to save his faith, when the key to both might lie closer to their California home. They seem the ultimate mismatched couple: Charles is brooding and neurotic; his wife businesslike and practical. Positively laden with references to the icons of Western culture, and infused with irony and satire, the narrative drags at points when Skibell uses his fictional setting to reflect on the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust and to argue that Wagner contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism. About the quest for both spiritual satisfaction and marital contentment, the story moves to a surprisingly rich denouement in which Charles's dour intellectualism takes second place to his emotional fulfillment. 10-city author tour. (June 6)
