Secret Correspondance CL

The ambitious structure of this debut novel is akin to that of a dream of one of the protagonists: ``Like an Escher picture, where the repetition of one thing in a pattern metamorphoses into something else in its negative space.'' Lara, a New Yorker living in a future that bears no evidence of either an evolved zeitgeist or new technologies, sifts through the journals of her adoptive aunt Gabby, an alienated, lonely artist who disappeared 20 years earlier, in the 1990s. Preparing a biography, Lara also seeks clues to her now-famous aunt's whereabouts. Gabby herself, it emerges, undertook a similar quest with the diaries of her supposedly mad, vanished uncle, gradually yielding her identity to his--just as Lara, under the spell of her aunt's writing, grows increasingly like Gabby. Though Golub handles shifts among among the distinctive voices deftly, her characters transform themselves too readily; their malleability seems a wholly artificial expression of the author's thesis: that rejection will not vanquish the marginal or disaffected, that their pain inevitably returns to society and, occasionally, surfaces as art. (Mar.)