STEPS AND EXES

From the author of Graceland (1992), etc.: an amateurish near-parody of a literary novel, featuring a collection of characters who seem to be 13-year-olds dressed in adult costumes, romping their immaturities through a needlessly complex storyline. The story opens with Celia Henry rising into her day as owner and operator of Henry’s House, a B&B located on an island in Puget Sound. A quick tour of the island suggests the bubble-gum flavor of the tale: the town is called Massacre, major landmarks are Useless Point and Moonless Bay, one girl is called Brio, and the mute hermit boatsman is called Launch. Celia, “pushing fifty,” awakens next to Russell, the half-satisfying man in her life, to whom she is righteously not married. An advocate of “unfettered love,” Celia has a male-shaped chip on her shoulder big enough to house a family—which she does, populating her residence with a scattering of former lovers, differently fathered children, step-youth, half-partners, friends-in-law, and a couple of dogs named Sass and Squatch. Her variably related daughters, Bethie, Sunny, and Victoria, have scooted off the island and landed themselves in heaps-o—-trouble. Bethie falls for brainwashing ex—drug addict Wade; Victoria embraces conventional but (gasp!) dull Eric; Sunny, frightened she may die of breast cancer, returns home with daughter Brio. To complete the grand-slam crisis fest, Bethie’s mother-in-law, Dorothy, on a visit to Henry’s House, topples with a heart attack, and Bethie accuses her father of abusing her sexually as a child. All eventually are healed under Celia’s unorthodox beneficence (she teaches fiftysomething housewife Dorothy, for instance, the cathartic pluses of spitting), all the daughters divorce or leave their men, and one of them actually says she is “dying, Egypt, dying” . . . three times. Readers will welcome the boat that carries them all home from this visit to Dismal Fiction, the tiny island that art forgot.