THE DAY

Hobbie's second novel (Boomfell, 1991) is a morning-to- midnight chronicle: the single long day of a family's annual Thanksgiving gathering. Beneath the surface proprieties are tremors of angst, uncertainty, and foreboding. Jack Fletcher is a waiting-for-success architect married to Gwen Wells (two kids), and each Thanksgiving—as now—he and his family go to the enviably upscale Connecticut house of Gwen's sister Penny and her investment-broker husband Peter (three kids), the families joined, too, by a set of aging in-laws. Amid the happy-cantankerous crowd of kids and adults, however (including a brassy-but-sexy guest named Liz, brought from college by Penny and Peter's oldest daughter), is an important absence that keeps the hyper-thoughtful Jack moodily preoccupied from page one. Clare Wells, sister of Gwen and Penny, had been the family's black sheep- -leaving home, embracing liberal causes, having a baby (whose?), falling farther out of touch, and then, exactly a year ago, killing herself with pills. Whose fault? Why can't—mustn't—the family talk about it now? Jack's inner musings on the subject are woven among servings of turkey and pie, old family jokes, and walks in the woods—giving him time to let the reader know that he's an ex- (and still deeply impassioned) lover of the dead Clare; to cop a feel from Liz, the young guest (there's a meaningful secret in her past too); to share a joint; and, before bed, while musing in the backyard about American history and his father-in-law's prostate cancer, to reveal a recent fling with the lady next door and consider another. Plentiful meditations on everything from aging to AIDS and cancer to the cosmos from a not-very-prepossessing central character. A skillfully woven narrative, in all, that tries hard for meaning but remains a kind of domestic melodrama for the college-educateds.