I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas (Signed/First Edition)

In "Winter," "De Havilland hand," and "A summer in Maine," characters explore the love between parents and children

Gilchrist ( Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle ) brings back familiar characters in three linked, deeply perceptive novellas focusing on the Hand family of Charlotte, N.C. In "Winter" famed novelist Anna Hand, ill with cancer, gives her last energies to save her adored young niece Jessie from her neurotic mother, Sheila, taking a dangerous journey to Turkey to secure proof that Sheila is an unfit parent. In "De Havilland Hand," Anna's other niece surfaces, the headstrong half-Cherokee Olivia, child of Daniel Hand's idyllic hippie-period marriage to the now dead Summer Deer. Both Jessie and Olivia confront their baffled father, aging Daniel, and learn to coexist. "A Summer in Maine" gathers a houseful of kinfolk and close acquaintances to recover Anna's literary papers. Instead they carry on their "junky troubled life" of lovemaking and wrangling, in a welter of voices, the most humane being that of the black servant Traceleen. Gilchrist brilliantly captures the intimate accents and rhythms of a family under stress.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this trio of interrelated novellas, the Mannings and the Hands cope with complex love relationships, familial and romantic, in a setting that is both retrospective and contemporary. Daniel Hand meets his first (Cherokee) wife in San Francisco in the 1960s, and they celebrate their love with drugs and sex. Far from those carefree days, Lydia ruminates on the specter of AIDS when she considers a tryst with a tennis instructor. The stories are a comfortable blend of old and new; the prose flows. Thus, Anna Hand describes falling in love as "when your eyes meet and you should dance and you love every word each other says." The last novella, concerned with the aftermath of Anna's death and the shotgun marriage of two lovesick teenagers, is written alternately from the perspectives of all characters featured. Although initially confusing, ultimately this approach is successful. Gilchrist has created a thoroughly engaging work.
-Kimberly G. Allen, National Assn. of Homebuilders Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.