ACROSS THE COMMON

A very nice small book, this backward reconnaissance returns Louise, after twelve years of marriage, to the household of her childhood, an airless Victorian house dominated by three aunts with a capacity to ""smother...crush...exterminate."" For the Braithwaites are brahmins of a sort--a rigidly inflexible trinity with a ""strange...ambience that lay like fall-out over the family"" which has also threatened to destroy Louise's life with Max, a painter. Remnant by remnant, a letter here, legacy, the unintentional revelations of her grandfather's suicide, the crime which took place on the ""common,"" all achieve the exorcism of the past and her release. It's not a very important book but it's written with humor, intelligence and a faultless sense of detail, so that this close and changeless world, dead as it may be, is also very much alive.