Jennie Passing by

Christie is an accountant; this self-published book is, he admits, his first piece of writing other than postcards and tax memoranda. The result is a string of summaries of disconnected events, preachings, panegyrics and asides to the reader. In 1940, narrator Ben Sandquist is 13 when the feisty Jennie Lee moves in across the street in Queens, N.Y. His parents are Swedish, hers Malayan; the two become soul mates. Ten years later, Ben and Jennie go ``from no romance to marriage in one day.'' In 1956, Ben's widowed mother disappears in Sweden, but sends a letter to Jennie from which Ben learns that he, himself, died in the Korean War. So what happened? Apparently Jennie loved Ben so much that she found him across time, space and death--loved him enough so that they could be reunited in the Queens College Music Department in order to live out a corny, treacly love in an alternate universe that's easily explained by quantum physics. When Jennie dies in 1994, Ben searches all the likely places for her, and finds her in Carnegie Hall at a concert by Jussi Bjoerling, himself 30 years dead. Told as Ben's love letter to Jennie, this book dictates emotion rather than evoking it. (Nov.)