Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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The war on terrorism exists on many planes in Carolyn See's new novel, real and imagined. Real warfare seems perpetual, although far away. At home, doctors grapple with deaths that may be caused by bioterrorists. And then there is the terror of having a life that is not the one you want.
The veteran author, in her seventh novel and the first since 2000's The Handyman, weaves these frightening strands through a tapestry of lives set mostly in 2007, although you first meet her characters as the World Trade Center falls in 2001 and watch their lives unfold through 2016.
You'd think that a story laced with paranoia and regret might hit too close to the bone to be entertaining when the real world is beset by war and terrorism. But it is -- very. See brings a dark humor to the proceedings that lightens the tone and adds perspective.
There are echoes of early Joan Didion and Philip Roth in See's spare, fluid narrative about people who have become lost in their own lives, ricocheting in the glaring sunlight of Southern California in search of the people they might have been. They go through the motions but are, at the core, detached from the relatives, jobs and material things that anchor them.
The story begins with Edith, who loses her beloved husband the night before terrorists bring down the twin towers in Manhattan, an event she cannot grasp because "the only human being who ever loved me -- except for my goofy son, maybe -- died last night."
Then we jump ahead to 2007, where said "goofy son," a dermatologist at UCLA Medical Center, sees dead cats from his office window, harbingers of an ill wind that will soon overtake him. Phil has a job he's indifferent about, a wife he doesn't love and two sullen children. He persuades Edith to volunteer at the medical center, even though she notes, "I've never liked the sight of blood. And I've never been that crazy about people either."
Their stories dovetail after that, Edith's punctuated by a series of humorous but ill-fated dating forays with geriatric gentleman callers, and Phil's marked by his reluctant involvement with a secret medical team that has been conscripted to treat illnesses that may have been caused by bioterrorists. See thus surrounds their personal calamities with the background hum of a world that might soon go up in smoke.
Both mother and son are flawed, often self-centered people. What redeems them both is one great love -- Edith's for her son, and Phil's for his young son, the withdrawn and angry Vernon, for whom he feels "a terrible, soft embarrassing love." Edith helps her son as his once well-ordered life starts to tumble and Phil tries to save Vernon from that wreckage.
With wry insight and a unique mix of hope and cynicism, See speaks to the nature of being human in today's complicated world. In life and fiction, people fear their search for meaning and enduring love could be wiped out by the next great disaster. But still they search.
There Will Never Be
Another You
By Carolyn See
Random House, 242 pp., $24.95
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