FOOTPRINTS

The author of Life Estates (1994), among other portraits of women struggling through a Sargasso of ego-entanglements, here tracks a marriage splintering in an agony of deep grief after the death of a beloved daughter. ``A lot of wishes and feelings lay buried in a person, then something like this tragedy comes along and uncovers them.'' So declares Douglas, sorrowful husband of Nan, who narrates here. The accidental death of their 22-year-old daughter Bethany, and then the gift of her heart to prolong the life of a frail Texas preacher, does indeed blast apart the secure ``compromises'' of the 25-year-old marriage, releasing fevered resentments, other griefs, old rage. Nan, who cut short her academic career in paleontology, chaffs against her husband's (deserved, she knows) success as a ``brain scientist.'' She thrashes against the confines of her marriage, her untended desires, her increasingly strange life- -symbolized for her by Syracuse, the wintry city in upstate New York where she now lives, as opposed to the warm breadth of her native Texas. Nan will absorb herself in fossil hunting, while Douglas drifts toward an affair (does he resurrect a desire to have more babies? a ``replacement'' for Bethany?), and becomes obsessed with the man who has his daughter's heart as if ``she still was.'' Healing will take place as Douglas confronts an old savage grief and recovers a closeness to their son. And Nan, turning back from her escape into science, confronts her grief when she watches a transplant operation and witnesses a miracle. A stimulating read, crammed with thorny themes and scientific marvels: fossil ``footprints'' billions of years old; the fluttering of a living heart; underwater creatures rich and strange. Hearon skimps on character—Douglas and Nan are at times reduced by the novel's weighty concerns to lecturing, hectoring shells—but even so this is a bright, involving work, if more somber than Hearon's others.