Beer

A novel in the form of family memoir compressed into one hot afternoon, each member's narrative interwoven with the youngest's recollection of that ordinary, extraordinary day.

A young boy sits in a dark bar waiting for his father to finish his beer. His mother waits for them on the baking sidewalk outside. At the end of the day they will return home, the father drunk, the mother furious, the day's outing an all-too-familiar disaster.

Other voices alternate with the boy's own, past alternating with present and future in a timeless continuum. Mother and father ask understanding for behavior they could neither control nor understand. The eldest son smarts years after the physical and emotional violence he endured as collateral damage of his parents' unhappy union. A younger sister many years later still craves the maternal support she never received. A second son continues to bear the weight of being both the object and victim of his mother's all-but-incestuous love.

The reader has a sense of eavesdropping on family secrets, drawn into a kind of complicity with the revelations of this one family but addressed to the dark heart of families generally: how is it so much love has so much power to destroy?

The afternoon drags on, first in that bar, then in the surrounding neighborhood where the boy-narrator and his mother seek relief from the heat and their long vigil. For the boy, these family histories have yet to take place or are buried in the deep past. For the others they are accounts that flow backward and forward, weaving what has already taken place into what has yet to happen.

"Home is where a part of you a goes on living long after you have moved elsewhere and grown old, that tugs at you and is perhaps better left unrevisited because, no matter how much bad there was, it always remains a paradise lost, the one time when your existence was complete, when all the characters that should be there were there, when happiness seemed not only possible but a daily routine that could so easily be mistaken for normalcy."

By the author of Look at Me Now, Billy Boy, Song of the Mockingbird, My Bess and The Jew's Wife & Other Stories.