Freeing Vera

Frannie D'Amato, the lesbian artist and activist narrator of Raffa's earnest, angry debut novel, owns all the willfulness and fury her multiple sclerosis-stricken mother won't. The target of Frannie's anger (which never dissipates over the course of the novel, spanning the '70s and '80s) is her father, Anthony. A physician, he mentally abuses and manipulates Frannie and her three older siblings while neglecting his invalid wife, who abdicated her willpower long before she lost control of her muscles. Frannie's survival instincts catapult her away from home and her dysfunctional family the day after she graduates from high school, and she leaves upstate New York for Chicago, where she finds community with a socialist lesbian feminist collective. Though she comes into her own—falling in love with a woman, agitating for disability rights—Frannie can't free herself of her warped family and her suffering, abandoned mother. Long repulsed by Vera's decay, Anthony leaves her for a younger man and attempts to use his homosexuality as a point of common ground with Frannie. Despite his children's insistence, Anthony never does the right thing by his wife. Raffa certainly piles up the evidence against Anthony, but this unmitigated vilification reads more like an exorcism or political screed than literature. (Aug.)