MAGNETIC FIELD(S)

by Ron Loewinsohn ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 1983

Loewinsohn's poems (this is his first novel) have frequently been preoccupied with a sense of dimpling coziness, domestic interiors. And though he has tricked-up this trio of interlocking stories with fugal fictional techniques (e.g., repetition in different contexts), the point is a sentimental, simpleminded one familiar from the poetry: ""It was what everyone wanted and almost nobody did, to slip out of or through the structure that gave your life a shape into a room where your life took the shape you wanted it to have, to love and be loved by someone perfectly beautiful."" Thus, in the first section, a young burglar finds himself doing his dangerous work less for the loot than for the thrilling recognition that ""Other people live their life here, something that absolutely excluded him."" Then, as this first part ends and the second begins, the burglar is spotted leaving an incompletely robbed house--the house, it turns out, of David, a San Francisco composer of electronic music who is only days away from going East with his family for the summer: they will live there in a rented house belonging to a couple whose genius child was accidentally killed sometime before; these ghosts of other lives--left in someone else's house--provide a second structure, or house, around David's lire. And finally, in the third section, Daniel, a friend of David's, conducts a philandering affair. . . which, of course, exposes him, too, to duplicitous spaces, secret goings-on. There's occasional charm in this offbeat book's earnest oddness; Loewinsohn is good at loading on details of daily life at its most artificial. But he's a cardboard stylist for the most part (""Her skin, the skin of her face and down her neck, was incredible""). And the variations on the theme here--other-people's-houses as a symbol of everyone's innermost yearnings--can't disguise its mushy, dreamily simplistic nature. An engaging notion for a poem, perhaps, but awfully thin, obvious, and precious as a novel.

Pub Date: May 31, 1983

ISBN: 1564782824

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION