HENRY IN LOVE

by Marian Thurm ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1990

As in Thurm's Walking Distance (1987), love is challenged by approaching death: a dazzling charmer of a man in his early 70s is dying of a debilitating disease, while his much younger wife, at one point queenpin of an unlikely trio with her husband's ex-wife and daughter, yearns simply to get through with it--""easing [him] out of this life with her eyes wide open, with perfect vision."" Henry, 69, and Kate, 28, marry and, a year later, produce baby Darlan; Henry cheerfully wears a thumb-to-nose T-shirt proclaiming, ""I'm the Father."" He adores the baby, adores Kate, who, after the divorce from ex-wife Cynthia--the pretty, jumpy sociologist who ""relates"" like a blister--means to him ""Love, desire and an end to loneliness."" But when Cynthia telephones, Henry, feeling silly, angry, oddly touched, travels from Maine to Boston for one sexual matinee. At home, Kate welcomes 33-year-old Nina, Henry's daughter by his first wife (pre-Cynthia), who hasn't come neat her father for 25 years. The reunion is a modified success. Then, however, Henry's illness begins. Weakness drains his strength; and his quips and philosophic zingers (bearing love and sadness) are filtered through a mumbled speech only Kate and Day--a barroom-pianist/clown-school-dropout/nurse--can understand. (""Like watching a foreign Film without the subtitles,"" cries Cynthia.) Yet in Henry's dreams he's still young, ""giving off heat and light, transformed by love into something dazzling."" The Henry-orchestrated dying day brings the surety that among the women he's ""the center of things,"" and he leaves with, ""This is one lucky son-of-a-bitch you're looking at!"" Thurm is a cool writer, like Beattie or Adams, and emotions appear out of nowhere and wild-fire on without casting a shadow. Moment-by-moment interplay between Thurm's people is marked by a crystal precision, and the talk is wonderful--witty, buoyant, playfully oblique. A touching, classy dying.

Pub Date: March 1, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Bantam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990

Categories: FICTION