Here Lies the Water

Steinbach's intense and technically proficient, if insistently rarefied, novel of a circle of friends in rural New England addresses the misunderstandings and lies that destroy people by depriving them of ``the human will to love and learn.'' These 72 brief chapters in a discontinuous chronology deny the reader the security of conventional structure. Writer Leslie Bailey's life reflects this disquiet: her first lover died young and her second, Magdalena Parker, arrives and departs suddenly, always without notice. Magdalena herself knows nothing of her own origins; she was adopted to replace an infant who perished during a family's flight from Nazi Germany. Robert Adams, a former activist who worked his way out of Harlem and became a neurosurgeon, sees children--black and white--suffering under yet another generation of bigotry. Jennifer Hyde, a textile designer, vanishes to join a religious cult, while Harry Oldings White, in one of the book's moments of dark humor, absently wanders in front of a chicken truck and leaves this world ``surrounded by a funeral wreath of chickens.'' O. Henry Award-winner Steinbach wrote Zara. ( May )