cover image A Geometry of Lilies: Life and Death in an American Family

A Geometry of Lilies: Life and Death in an American Family

Steven Harvey. University of South Carolina Press, $14.95 (141pp) ISBN 978-0-87249-895-2

Arguing that Thoreau's call to ``simplify, simplify'' cannot be applied to the vital life of a family, Harvey, an English professor at Young Harris College in Georgia, spins a dreamy evocation of his own family. Each one of these 11 essays is rich in memory and description. His impressionistic exegesis drifts back and forth: his daughter performing in a play, an ancestor building a home on the prairie, hours spent admiring the covered breasts of a young woman in class, his crush on one of his English students (this piece is followed swiftly and wisely with a paen to his wife) and, finally, remembering his mother, who killed herself. Harvey lauds the instincts of the seemingly rootless nuclear family to fill voids left by the dissolution of the traditional extended family with the complex and satisfying new rituals peculiar to it (``nonce rituals,'' he calls them). He might, though, have made his case stronger by exploring other families as well. (Sept.)