AVAILABLE LIGHT - Softcover

Few writers have been as enthusiastically embraced as Ellen Currie was when her short stories first appeared in The New Yorker and other publications in the late 1950s. Her first novel, Available Light, proved worth a 25-year wait when it was met with the delight of both critics and readers, and her subsequent story collection, Moses Supposes, was a National Book Award Finalist.

There is pathos underlying the rollicking comedy in Currie's inspired debut, but readers gleefully rocketing at top speed from page to page will not be consciously aware of it until they are brought up short in the novel's final chapters. Written with deadpan, irreverent comic verve, with dialogue so saucy that one keeps wanting to say, "Listen to this!", the book has as memorable a cast of characters as we'll see this season. There's vulnerable, engaging Kitty, in her mid-30s and waiting for her life to begin, only to realize, when her lover Rambeau leaves her, that he is her life; there's softhearted Rambeau, saxophone player and gambler on a permanent losing streak, who takes up with Drindy and vows to take care of her baby; there's huge, amoral Drindy, whose baby's father is smarmy Gordon, married to Kitty's sister Eileen, who desperately wants to be pregnant; there's Mick, mother to Kitty and Eileen, possessed of blue eyes like a sword's flash and a tongue to match; there's diminutive Mr. Gordon, poet manque and baby snatcher; and there's Rambeau's dog, a duplicitous creature who bites Kitty and dotes on everyone else. The antics of this eccentric crowd, as they weave in and out of hilarious scenes rife with wild but cannily managed coincidences, sometimes remind one of Fay Weldon's novels. But Currie has a unique and original voice, and she reveals the dark secrets in her characters' hearts with a wit and bravado that ennobles what she calls "the whole human escapade." BOMC alternate. February2
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