SPINNING AT THE EDGES

Politics and history underpin personal issues in a small Connecticut lakeside town in the early 2000s.

Stephanie Pearl’s mother, Ruth, has always been remote and uncommunicative about her childhood in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Perhaps that maternal reserve is the cause of the “heaviness” that prompts 39-year-old Stephanie’s boyfriend to dump her after six years. Still reeling from the breakup, Stephanie isn’t overly sympathetic when Ruth freaks out that her neighbor is building a perfectly legal extension that will spoil her view of nearby Lake Topaqua. “It’s happening again. They’re taking things from us,” Ruth declares. “This is America, Mamma. Nothing like that can happen here,” Stephanie replies, words that will reverberate as Bush v. Gore makes its way through the courts: a backdrop to fraught interactions among a large cast of characters. Among them are Arthur Cantrell, a local judge who helped Ruth pull suicidal teen Ian Lima from the lake several months earlier; Ian’s guilt-ridden mother, Missy, Stephanie’s best friend from high school; Willa Fletcher, an attorney Arthur was dating but lately is just ghosting; Bill Cousins, the neighbor building an extension to shelter his elderly parents, and many, many more. The web of relationships gets hard to untangle due to a convoluted timeline that zigzags back and forth, alluding briefly to seminal events like Ian’s suicide attempt, then circling back later to explain their origins. Nonetheless, Poliner crafts a moving tale of damaged people tentatively trying to make amends to those they have hurt and to move past the traumas that drive their destructive actions. Alcoholism, failed marriages, parental rage, and closeted homosexuality are among the well-worn motivations the author doles out to her characters, but they’re well-worn because they’re common human problems, and her treatment is sensitive. Poliner doesn’t overdo it, but the theme of how the law can be abused makes for a sobering undercurrent to the characters’ individual problems.

Tender treatment of flawed but sympathetic characters compensates for a sometimes confusing storyline.