cover image Tracks of Angels

Tracks of Angels

Kelly Dwyer. Putnam Publishing Group, $22.95 (270pp) ISBN 978-0-399-13882-9

Though she demonstrates a promising talent, Dwyer's sensitive fiction debut is burdened with blatant literary devices. Her prose is admirably controlled and her grasp of character is insightful, but ultimately she constructs the kind of plot common to first novels: heavy with suppressed emotion and resonating with a guilt that seems overly dramatic when its source is revealed. Waiflike 18-year-old narrator Laura Neuman comes to Boston because it is far away from her hometown of Redondo Beach, Calif. Laura's mother was diagnosed with cancer when Laura was 10 and died two years later; her father's death was more recent and its circumstances are the subject of portentous asides. Laura's conflicted psyche stems from those tragedies but began earlier in her life, when she was pulled between her Jewish mother and maternal grandparents on one side and her Catholic father and her paternal, very devout grandmother on the other. A serious child given to theosophical speculation, Laura conjures up an imaginary angel who offers her wry advice and whose appearance changes for the worse (``stringy hair, streaked with gray . . . and dry, flaky skin'') as Laura herself approaches emotional breakdown. She becomes a waitress in a Boston restaurant, makes some friends and finds a lover--who, predictably, betrays her. Laura's loneliness, grief and pessimism, her sense of bewilderment and loss of psychological equilibrium are well conveyed. However, her epiphany is achieved via an overly manipulated, unconvincing denouement. Literary Guild alternate. (Jan.)