Lily Beach

After an overwrought beginning, Fields's first novel develops into an intense, well-plotted narrative, rich in symbolism and imagination. During the 1960s, Lily Beach moves from Iowa City to Illinois and back in desperate attempts to erase the emotional scars left by a childhood of abuse, inconstancy and loss. Like Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening , Lily uses both art (she's a printmaker) and sex as means for self-expression and self-annihilation. She is involved with three men who threaten to suffocate her with the very qualities that draw her to them: Will's angry exhilarating passion; Ted's sense of propriety; Andre's artistic intensity. A fourth man, Jack, hovers in the background, following her everywhere. Fields diminishes the impact of her characterization through overstatement and unnecessary explanation; her writing is sometimes marked by the same excesses that define Lily's life. Still, the prose often has the brilliant immediacy of a photograph, making this probing examination of sexuality, identity and love a promising debut. BOMC featured alternate. (Apr.)