AS WE FORGIVE

by Barbara Neil ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1986

First-novelist Neil casts an eerie, pale light on the murky Laocoonian coils of a middle-aged man's perverse sexual obsession as it holds two young women in a deadly embrace. Nineteen-year-old Lydia Evans and her lover and husband-to-be, gentle, ""curiously aged"" math teacher Eric, were both only and lonely children, with a ""shyness about life,"" and they are blissfully happy to have found each other. Then suddenly 50-ish Ben Wavell, father of Lydia's envied and occasional childhood friend Nathalie (""Natta""), reenters Lydia's life. She remembers him from the days when she was casually invited to Natta's wealthy home, ""Eden."" That marvelous father--so unlike her own remote father--was ""huge, not fat, but with great limbs that constantly moved, describing, ordering, teasing. . .parts of the room not filled with Ms body were filled with his all-pervading presence."" Lydia relives in memory the Eden household: Ben's dark and beautiful wife, Viola, and Natta, his ""wonderful, brave, precocious daughter."" But now Ben is divorced, his darling Natta has left, and there is ""little Lyd""--still looking 12 years old. Abruptly, Lydia, child of a loveless father who jealously craved the love lavished on the privileged Viola and Natta, knows that Ben is ""accessible; this Ideal, this God."" She leaves Eric (a cruelty she turns upon herself) and goes with Ben to a house by the sea. Then, at last, consummation--but their affair has ""tidal limitations."" Natta returns; and from Lydia, Ben withdraws passion, tenderness and his very self. Sloughed off, Lydia takes a sea-turn in a descent into nightmare and a new persona--in wounding Eric she had changed from one to whom things happen to a destroyer who ""made things happen."" Yet eventually she and Eric will marry, settle into Midlands respectability, until. . .four years later there's a Watcher at Lydia's gate, and she will hear a tale of incest and murder and read the signs of her destiny. But after all, to angelic Eric ""there would be no need for explanations."" A sustained if airless plumb of a dark obsession, which, if dim around the edges with merely expedient minor characters, still has the eely fascination of the Sargasso undertow.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION