Losing It

From Publishers WeeklyIt takes only a week for the Sterling household to crumble and collapse in Canadian writer Cumyn's first novel to be published in the U.S. The Sterlings are ordinary members of the educated middle class living in Ottawa, but turmoil lurks beneath their surface calm. Bob Sterling, a professor of literature specializing in Edgar Allan Poe, is secretly obsessed with women's underthings; Julia, Bob's much younger wife and former student, is quietly losing her mind from the exhaustion of caring for Matthew, their two-year-old, and her mother, Lenore, who is tormented by Alzheimer's. Lenore's illness and Bob's lechery cause the fall of the house of Sterling, both literally (Lenore, under the delusion that she is in prison, starts a fire and burns down the house) and figuratively. Bob gets involved with Sienna Chu, a long-legged coed who exudes erotic promise and writes incomprehensible verse, and is coaxed by her into donning female lingerie and a red dress in his office. Even more foolishly, Bob lets Sienna photograph him, an obviously risky act in the age of the Internet, as Bob soon discovers. Cumyn moves his story along briskly, leaping from one perspective to another. His skill with voices is akin to mimicry: he can transition from Lenore's Bosch-like inner life to Bob's seedier consciousness without a false step. The result is an unclassifiable novel that possesses the precision of a mathematical theorem, the hilarity of a Marx Brother's skit and the pathos of confession. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalShades of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Cumyn's darkly comic novel is the story of a family in meltdown. Julia Sterling, sleep-deprived slave to her demanding, still-nursing, two-year-old son and to her Alzheimer's-stricken mother, is "losing it." Julia's mother, Lenore, is losing it big time, as Alzheimer's both dispatches and confuses her present and past. And Julia's husband, a college professor, is about to lose everything, as he gives in to an attraction for an undergraduate and to the fulfillment of a rather kinky fetish. Propelled along by Julia's, Lenore's, and Bob's perspectives, as well as that of a former high school classmate of Julia who still pines after her, the story never seems as bizarre as the individual incidents: Lenore's escapades outside the nursing home, Bob's all-too-public "outing" on the Internet, the ensuing chaos after fire destroys Julia and Bob's home, and Bob's pitiful machinations to keep Julia in the dark about his fetish. Like Cumyn's Burridge Unbound (2000), a winner of the Ottawa Book Award, and The Corrections, this is an exceptional, affecting work that belongs in most fiction collections.Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.