The Light of Falling Stars

""A plane crashed."" That's the first sentence, and the crucial event, in this ambitious, elegiac debut. The darkest nightmare of every airport crowd comes true when the company announces that all passengers aboard are presumed dead. We watch Lennon's characters, as if under a magnifying glass, while they move through the initial shock of disaster into the accidental wasteland that their lives have suddenly become: from the strained couple first to discover the grisly crash site outside Marshall, Mont., to the young man anxiously awaiting his girlfriend's arrival on the plane and a middle-aged woman nervously anticipating the return of the husband who abandoned her years ago. Lennon has set himself a difficult task, and he acquits himself nobly, with flashes of beautiful writing that capture his characters' first tenuous steps out of tragedy's shadow. He paints a world tinged with loss, adeptly showing us sentiments left unspoken, relationships forever left dangling, silent moments of grief. Unfortunately, the final third of the story suffers from too many plot lines and characters: some of the subplots run out of steam, and the characters get forced into unlikely constellations. But even when the novel struggles for direction, Lennon's remains a new voice worth relishing, lucid and graceful even in his characters' darkest hours. German translation rights to Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag; author tour. (Aug.)