FALL ASLEEP FORGETTING

A terminally ill restaurateur and amateur poet meticulously plans his end on a late-summer morning on a Long Island beach—but a last-second intervention by another causes collateral damage in the community.

The plot centers on cancer-stricken Paul, a former automotive engineer who moved eastward and coastal for a life richer in poetry, but the chief character in Packard’s debut is Claude, a middle-aged photographer, mystic and sensualist who scratches out a subsistence on the lovely but unglamorous North Fork of Long Island. She finds herself attracted to Paul and his enigmatic, nearly mute wife, and the two women embark on a bizarre, resolutely nonverbal affair in which Paul acts less as a voyeur than as a supervisor or cheerleader. Eventually it becomes clear to Claude that Paul is sick, and that he’s attempting to provide his wife with not only an erotic outlet but also a person with whom (rather trickier, given her brooding taciturnity) to bond emotionally. These three move through a motley, interesting little community. There’s pretty transvestite Cherry Pickens, proprietress of Claude’s mobile-home park, and her lover, Barton; the bitter ex-soldier (and cardboard bigot) Saugerties, another denizen of the park; and nurse Rae, husband Sonny and their precocious, truant, religious-minded nine-year-old daughter, Six, who’s enmeshed in one way or another with everyone. The book buzzes with passion, sexual and artistic, but often the intensity seems awkwardly didactic or out of control, for instance when Paul, granted gnomic dying-man mode, consoles Six about having been called a gypsy at school by saying, “Well, let me get a good look at you. I would describe your beautiful skin color as that of rich sand, just touched by the sea.”

At times appealingly earnest, at others clumsy and mystic.