Geometry of Love

Darcy Johnson Wilson is fleeing Frank, her estranged husband, whom she left lying in the smashed wreckage of her kitchen in San Antonio, Tex., and is heading north toward the Oklahoma farmland of her lonely childhood. As the empty miles of road pass beneath her tires, Darcy sifts through a jumble of fragmented memories--her conflicted love for the mercurial and violent Frank, her short-order job at Jake's that provided a surprising solace, the bedraggled little house on a weedy cul-de-sac, her impulsive elopement--to find that at the core of her character lies the loveless drama of her parents' marriage. Shifting back and forth in time, Darcy examines the Chinese puzzle ball that is her life, searching the seamless surface for the patterns that will explain her predicament. She sees herself as the frigid planet Pluto revolving in inky blackness far from the imagined warmth of her mother's frustrated and angry sun. Exchanging her mother for Frank as the center of her universe, Darcy soon discovers that an object in orbit too close to the sun will burn in the star's raging heat. As Frank circles her house, calling to her and trying the locked windows and doors, Darcy huddles on the hallway floor. Terrified and yet yearning for love, she suddenly tears free of the imprisoning orbit and launches herself toward a shocking and painful freedom. In her debut novel, Cuccio demonstrates a gift for the lyricism of simple language. She constructs the invisible walls of emotional isolation with the delicate surety of a master glassblower, trapping inside the remarkably unself-pitying Darcy, from whom shines a halting courage and an uncommon longing that will disturb the reader for a long time. (Apr.)