Here Lies Rthe Water

Book by Steinbach, Meredith

Steinbach's intense and technically proficient, if insistently rarefied, novel of a circle of friends in rural New England addresses the misunderstandings and lies that destroy people by depriving them of "the human will to love and learn." These 72 brief chapters in a discontinuous chronology deny the reader the security of conventional structure. Writer Leslie Bailey's life reflects this disquiet: her first lover died young and her second, Magdalena Parker, arrives and departs suddenly, always without notice. Magdalena herself knows nothing of her own origins; she was adopted to replace an infant who perished during a family's flight from Nazi Germany. Robert Adams, a former activist who worked his way out of Harlem and became a neurosurgeon, sees children--black and white--suffering under yet another generation of bigotry. Jennifer Hyde, a textile designer, vanishes to join a religious cult, while Harry Oldings White, in one of the book's moments of dark humor, absently wanders in front of a chicken truck and leaves this world "surrounded by a funeral wreath of chickens." O. Henry Award-winner Steinbach wrote Zara.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.