Music for Glass Orchestra

There is something quite musical about Andreacchi's (Give My Heart Ease) second novel, not in the hyperbolic critical sense but in the actual construction. A fugue appears early on with the subject (a young boy whose bruised face makes the narrator leave Boston for Paris) being followed a few pages later by the counter-subject (the bruised face of her needy Alsatian lover, Stephane). Added to such compositional notions are certain leitmotifs-glass, man-eating birds, blood, martyrs. At heart, though, this is a love story between the narrator and Stephane, a violinist who can't seem to drag himself away from his abusive wife. While her writing is often worthy, Andreacchi might have been better off trying something simpler than a book based on interwoven intellectual conceits. Her brittle, bloodless, aesthete heroine (evidenced by the leitmotifs above) is common and the pretensions are largely predictable (""`Don't you even know Peter Jennings?' I had to admit that I did not.'') or surprisingly middle-brow (like the cliched references: ``in the light of 1066 and all that the date alone certainly gives one pause. A little pause is certainly called for in which to remember Duke William, newly King of the sceptr'd isle, bringing fire and the sword and the Norman way with towers to the green and pleasant land.'') Although this may not have been the best forum, still Andreacchi shows promise. (Dec.)