ACTS OF GOD

A middle-aged woman who can’t seem to get her life in focus realizes the past is bogging her down—in this melancholy new novel by Morris, a superb travel writer (Angels and Aliens, 1998, etc.) whose fictional achievements continue to be erratic.

When an invitation to her 30th high-school reunion reaches her, Tess Winterstone is divorced and living listlessly in a house hanging precariously over the central California coast. Her children, Ted and Jade—chronologically adult, but as incapable as their mother of making a commitment to work or school—decide the reunion would do Tess good and bundle her onto a plane for Chicago, where she visits her ailing, embittered mother before driving north to Winonah, Illinois. There, at a bar owned by her former boyfriend, Patrick, Tess makes uncomfortable contact with childhood friend/nemesis Margaret, who stole Patrick from her and is now married to wealthy Nick, a onetime football star. Morris intersperses Tess’s memories of youth in Winonah with an account of her romance with Nick, problems with her kids, and economic woes, which include a home that’s going to fall into Monterey Bay if she can’t get financing and cheaper insurance by having it placed on the National Register of Historic Houses. (It was built by a famous poet.) Both narratives make it clear that Tess has unfinished business with Margaret, who’s drinking heavily and in precarious mental health. Later, Margaret’s suicide sends Tess into a near-catatonic depression that doesn’t seem very different from her previous state of passive confusion, and the epiphany that restores her is too muddily explicated to be convincing. Morris has a winning way with metaphor, particularly the exemplification of life’s myriad uncertainties in the comments of Tess’s insurance-salesman father (“acts of God” is a policy clause as well as an existential force here); her prose is subtle, her storytelling solid. But the novel’s merits are sucked into the black hole created by her low-energy heroine.

Needs a shot of adrenaline.