Synopsis
When Katie and "Fish" Fisher's nine-year-old daughter, Rhea, appears from Texas, where she is being raised by Katie's mother, the entire family is beset by a summer of upheaval and problems
Reviews
Scofield ( Gringa ) depicts the complex relationships connecting 45-year-old twin brothers, Fish and Michael, in Oregon with their wives and children and their parents, who are celebrating 50 years of marriage. Fish, a mercurial, alcoholic carpenter in the Pacific Northwest, appears at the anniversary party after spending a year in jail. Eight years earlier, after Fish had punched her, his wife, Katie, left their baby daughter, Rhea, with her mother in Texas. Now, stuck in a dead-end relationship with a scientist and still obsessing about her failed marriage, Katie seeks advice from Michael's wife, Ursula, a therapist who works with emotionally disturbed children. Failed by Ursula, who with her own children feels alienated from Michael, a special-education teacher, Katie turns to self-help groups and learns from a friend to stop trying to control Fish's actions and emotions; she also arranges to bring Rhea from Texas for a visit. Although Fish's eventual change of heart toward Katie and Rhea seems implausible, Scofield nevertheless makes readers care what happens in the unpredictable lives of her appealing characters.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Scofield's second novel (after Gringa, 1989)--a family chronicle about twins (one good-as-gold, the other hard-to-handle), their wives, and their parents--is good at orchestrating the attractions and repulsions of intertwined lives over some 15 years. Gully and Geneva Fisher's twin sons are Fisher and Michael. Fisher, once in prison, suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome a decade after Vietnam, is married to Katie, who leaves him in 1978 when he hits her. She deposits daughter Rhea in Texas with her mother, then finds a new job and a boyfriend, geneticist Jeff, while mulling over divorce as Fish disappears and reappears. Meanwhile, Michael is too predictable to wife Ursula, who works with failed families (``If only Michael would surprise her. Doing what she can not imagine''). They also have troubles with son Carter (``emotionally immature, maybe morally retarded'') and daughter Juliette (aspiring to be a dancer). Scofield then shifts to Geneva and Gully (Gully having once spent time in the state mental hospital) and expertly shuffles her characters, contrasting Fisher's ``sheer energy'' and wife Katie's indecision (Fisher hits her but also reads ``The Sotweed Factor to her by kerosene lamp'') to Ursula's frustration with her husband and alienated children. Still, this is an all's-well-that-ends-well book: Katie finally brings Rhea back and decides ``I seem to have Fish in me as much as ever, and I can't just set him aside''; Michael and Ursula and the kids work things out; and Gully starts writing the story of his life in response to Rhea's curiosity. The characters can be a bit schematic, but Scofield does poetic justice to one of those messy, awful families where everybody is always getting into everybody else's business. Overall, a good read full of wise detail. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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