THE FURIES

Two lovers seemingly meant for each other plunge into a hellfire of contention, recrimination, and grief in Eberstadt’s unsparing fourth novel (after When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, 1997).

She’s overachieving Gwen Lewis, who works for a privately funded human rights organization offering redevelopment aid throughout the former Soviet Union. He’s Gideon Wolkowitz, an anarchic puppeteer and street theater performer whose merry band (Pants on Fire) is devoted to sabotaging NYC Mayor Giuliani’s policy of selling publicly owned buildings to corporations. Accidentally meeting both at home and abroad, Gwen and Gideon instantly, ecstatically connect: their mutual sexual hunger recognizes no boundaries, and when Gwen finds herself unexpectedly, inconveniently pregnant, they bravely rearrange priorities, and marry. Then the furies begin to descend. In a densely allusive, insistently metaphoric prose style (somewhat akin to Hortense Calisher’s), Eberstadt brilliantly employs a form of hectoring direct address to both her protagonists, concentrating with—well, furious intensity on Gwen’s panicky realization that the imperatives of childrearing may forever estrange her from her chosen life, and on Gideon’s constant need (shaped by a loveless itinerant childhood and youth) for validation and security. He loses himself in “work” scorned by Gwen’s upscale family and friends. She doggedly juggles care of infant daughter Bella with the career that’s slowly slipping away from her. Both parents are caught in “the trap of love-gone-wrong: you withdraw your love, and your lover, feeling unloved, acts only the more unlovable . . . . ” The noose never relaxes: a horrific shock climax seems to promise the freedom each demands of the other, but brings only further compromise and captivity. This essentially unoriginal plot gains great depth from two exhaustively penetrating characterizations and from Eberstadt’s virtual genius for ironically precise summary statement (“The earth is the Lord’s, but the abominations that you commit on it are your own,” etc.).

A bruising, punishing read: not to be missed.