HIGH STRUNG

A belated coming-of-ager about a woman in her 30s who returns home to Florence, Ohio, after a stint abroad to confront her family’s not-very-secret secrets.

After Merle Winslow’s mother Joannie dies in a car accident, 13-year-old Merle and her younger brother Olin are raised by their father Ernest and grandmother Lettie. At 18, Merle discovers that her mother was with a lover when she died. She stews over this information for four years before running off to England, where she hooks up with the decadent son of a British diplomat and works in the pornography-publishing business. The story opens ten years later, when Merle returns to Florence after her boyfriend proposes a sexual deviation beyond her limit. Back in Ohio, she finds that Olin, after a successful career in marketing, is now trying to become a stand-up comic, while Ernest has a new fiancé very different from Joannie—and Lettie is still feisty and difficult the way cute grandmothers in a novel of this sort always are. Soon Merle has met, through Lettie, a good-looking pilot named Frank. While Merle’s story is predictable and her “high-strung” zaniness kind of bland, the flashbacks to Ernest and Joannie’s romance have genuine resonance. The two meet in the ’60s in Oklahoma, where he studies unsuccessfully to be an engineer and she’s a precocious 17-year-old working at her father’s cheap motel. Both desperately unhappy, they cling to each other and elope, but, back in Florence, their marriage takes a major hit when Joannie and baby Merle are photographed outside the site of a student bombing at the local college where Ernest works. Although Joannie wasn’t actually involved in the bombing, Ernest loses his job and Joannie begins to drink. Unfortunately, Dalton doesn’t focus on them long enough once the marriage’s dissolution sets in, and readers are stuck with Merle and her inevitable happy ending.

Pleasant narrative, but a first novel even so that lacks any punch.