AN IMAGINATIVE EXPERIENCE

A love story that's simply, grandly, satisfying. But this is also a complex, multilayered, love story, which is to say it's vintage Wesley (A Sensible Life, 1990, etc.), in which two star-crossed Londoners eventually surface as if newborn from the world's stale hatreds and comic banalities. Again, the circumstantial clutter is touched by the light breeze of enchantment: A faithful dog (a Wesley staple) appears from nowhere; a garden blooms in stony soil. But the book begins with a sheep- -lying ``on its back in the center of the field with its legs in the air''—and with Julia Piper, fresh from the funeral of her husband and little boy, stopping a commuter train and leaping to the field to perform a blindly random act of rescue. From the train, Sylvester Wykes watches in puzzlement while poisonous fellow passenger Benson, ex-PI and bird-watcher, plans to follow Julia just for fun. Back in her apartment, Julia, torn by grief, scours away reminders of a hated husband and a beloved child before reviving enough to return to work cleaning apartments. Meanwhile Sylvester, who'd watched from a distance while his divorcing wife removed his worldly goods, hires a cleaning lady, sight unseen. It's Julia, of course, now accompanied by an oddly persistent mutt she'll later name Joyful. Sylvester leaves for the US on business, where he encounters a Goliath of racial sentiments (a societal blister also met in England; one of Julia's neighbors beeps racist inanities at intervals). Sylvester is also offered sex, but one whiff of his ex-wife's perfume on the bimbette and he's off for home—where Julia and Joyful wait. Healing begins, separately and then together, as finally, against the raucous hilarity of a Christmas party in Julia's apartment house (where Benson lies in wait), lives are joined, Joyful in attendance. Afloat on the cresting awfulness (and pathos) of human muddles, love—as Wesley finds it—is all the more luminous.