THE SUMMER AFTER JUNE

A fine-spun creation in which deeply original characters beautifully redeem a tale more obviously notable for its baroque profusion of incidents. Second-novelist Warlick (The Distance from the Heart of Things, 1996) starts with an unnerving tableau: Lindy, an emergency-room nurse and human-organ harvester, is preparing the body of her sister, June, for burial. June, who had recently given birth to a son, has been murdered during a robbery. Though Lindy is about to marry the pragmatic, gruff Cott, she skips the wedding and jumps a train out of Charlotte, North Carolina, with June’s infant son in tow. From the moment she negotiates the purchase of a used Cadillac to drive to her grandmother Esther’s place in Texas. Lindy emerges as an inspired, self-possessed soul. Warlick gives her every scrap of the biting, melancholy, often self-lacerating sense of humor she—ll need to survive the elaborately wrought vicissitudes of her story. Lindy’s voice finds a complement in that of Orrin, a childhood friend of June and Lindy’s who tends to Lindy’s safety while she hides out; and another in that of Esther, an unreconstructed tale-spinner—and the story’s emotional center—who’s living in a retirement residence while she awaits the sale of her Galveston home. It’s here that Lindy falls in love with Orrin, and here that Orrin reveals he is in fact the father of June’s son, whom the pair agree to call Little Man. The long-portended apocalypse—the flooding of Galveston and the destruction of Lindy’s escapist idyll—is dramatically rendered, with a single detail: the ark, built out of hay bales and wire. The wonderfully idiosyncratic personalities Warlick has conceived liberate her storytelling from the unconvincing, Plot-O- Matic extremes of circumstance that sometimes creep in. (Author tour)