Sister

Haunting and poetic, this remarkable first novel of teenage love and alienation reimagines The Tempest from Caliban's point of view. Narrator Wilson, a 17-year-old newly arrived from Nebraska in an unnamed Louisiana city, has been an outsider all his life and easily fits into the role of lone observer. Sent by a landscape company to tend the property of a family named Miller, he immediately appropriates their garden as his own and soon, like Caliban, is spying on them--Holiday and Anne, their daughters Marian and Olivia--and living beneath their gazebo. Eventually taking up residence in their basement, he stealthily watches the Millers' dramas and protectively eyes the garden. Then one night he reveals his passion to Olivia; they become lovers and her resulting pregnancy sparks the novel's extreme conclusion in which the Prospero-like Holiday is compelled to destroy the upper-middle-class idyll he has created. Lewis's descriptive language is charged with the complex, enigmatic personality of his narrator, who is far more than just a noble savage--indeed, there is a good deal of Prospero in Wilson as well as in Holiday. (``I'm a magician,'' the boy declares. ``My mother was a witch, a Sycorax of the North Plains.'') Delicately balancing moods, the author infuses the novel with a young lover's optimistic sense that anything is possible, yet scatters portents throughout that a happy ending is unlikely. ( May )