CARELESS LOVE

In this literary novel, a man seeks to uncover the vacation romance that resulted in his birth.

In 1979, Grace Rolston flies to Hawaii not long after her Hollywood director husband asked her for a divorce. Grace was carrying on a not-so-secret affair, to be sure, but Nick Rolston is no easy man to live with. She’s planning to do a bit of soul-searching on Oahu, but she packs a .38 revolver in her suitcase just in case the trip doesn’t go as planned. Alone on the veranda of the Pickering Club, she asks a brooding man for a cigarette. Well, the first thing she asks him is actually “What happened to your finger?” Peter Lee Corbet is missing a finger. He says it’s a long story. Everything with Lee is a long story. He doesn’t have a cigarette, but he leads Grace on an adventure to bum one from the kitchen staff, and so begins a whirlwind romance between two damaged people far from home. Years later, shortly before her death, Grace tells her adult child that he is not, in fact, Nick’s son as he’s always assumed. That son, who narrates the novel, resolves to discover the truth of what happened in Hawaii: How Grace and Lee came together and why he has never heard of the man until now. Zettler’s prose is razor-sharp, especially the dialogue: “Lee had never disclosed any specifics about the day he lost his finger. No one ever seemed to get the details….‘It’s depressing as hell and it’s never going to bring Cokely or Hanratty back to their families. Not in a million years. So what is the goddamned point?’ ” The author excels at hinting at his characters’ backstories in a way that provides them with uncommon depth and whets readers’ appetites to learn more. The audience can more or less guess where things are going, but the journey is surprising and worthwhile. For a book with a premise straight out of an Elvis Presley song, it packs an unexpected emotional punch.

A powerful tale of the many ways love can go wrong.