CAROLINE

A blind lawyer embarks on a stormy affair in this novel.

Blind since ninth grade, young attorney Nick Coleman moves to New York City at the start of the Ronald Reagan presidency to work for the Defenders Alliance, a nonprofit, legal-aid group. He handles appeals for indigent convicts—many of whom seem pretty guilty—and harbors an ambition to write fiction. In a writing class, he meets Caroline Sedlak, a sweet, cheerful, 20-something former leotard model who unobtrusively guides him around town and admires his stories as much as he does hers. Their relationship blossoms—they even manage to weather a stressful sojourn in France. But Nick can’t bring himself to commit, in part because of hints of something off-kilter in Caroline: a past relationship with a drug dealer; an imbroglio with a friend who occupies her apartment; a lack of ambition and direction; and sexual kinks, including her spanking fetish and initiation of a three-way that doesn’t go well. Nick and Caroline drift along until she unexpectedly gets pregnant, and their fraying bond spirals into madness and trauma. In this moody, atmospheric novel, Spratt, himself a blind lawyer, presents a remarkable portrayal of the life of a sightless New Yorker as Nick forms friendships with his hired readers, navigates the metropolis with the help of cohorts and strangers, and feels frustration at his exclusion from a world of shared images. (“There came a point that evening when their admiring asides about Central Park to the north and the sweep of the West Side out to the Hudson depressed me….I turned my attention to my plate, making food my external stimulus, and the moment passed without anyone seeming to notice.”) The author also unravels the slow processes by which friends, family members, and lovers change one another, writing in prose that’s psychologically exacting but infused with poetic resonance. (“I was haunted by an image of Caroline’s back as she trudged along dimly lit, endlessly turning passageways, their walls, floors and ceilings hacked out of subterranean rock. I yearned to catch up to her as she walked wearily but steadily away to declare I loved her.”) The result is a searing look at a troubled relationship.

A richly textured portrait of a sometimes luminous, sometimes bleak romance.