cover image Lucky Man, Lucky Woman

Lucky Man, Lucky Woman

Jack Driscoll. Pushcart Press, $24.5 (264pp) ISBN 978-1-888889-08-6

It's barely summer in the seaside community of Mystic, Conn., and Perry Lafond, the restive, 38-year-old hero of Driscoll's searing first novel--recipient of the 17th annual Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award--is facing ""the worst funk of his life."" Chafing at the confines of both his childless 15-year marriage to Marcia, who's now enduring a grueling regimen of fertility injections, and his job as a probation officer, for which he long ago gave up a career as a teacher, Perry has begun flirting with a second adolescence. He's taking his Harley on late-night rides, rereading Nieztche and testing the affections of two actual mothers--Marcia's twin sister, Pauline, who's navigating her own divorce, and Angela, the wife of Roland, an irascible trailer-park parolee. Still haunted by nightmares of his sister, who drowned at age five on the grounds of his parent's cherry orchard, Perry is thrown into an emotional free fall after causing a jet ski accident involving his young nephew, and by news that his mother has had a second stroke, prompting a grim visit to his family estate in Northern Michigan where little has changed since his sister's death. Driscoll writes with an elegiacal kitchen-sink realism so suffused with detail that every nuance of the recriminating conversations, fraught silences and introspective fugues of Perry and Marcia is spun out at ponderous length. Yet there's also a cinematic fluidity to certain scenes, as when Perry returns from Michigan to a fiery showdown with Roland and a trial separation from Marcia, which leads to a stint of lobster fishing with his friend, Wayne, an itinerant Vietnam vet--and the first signs of catharsis. The story will resonate with readers, however, for what finally emerges, from both the high drama of reckless accidents and the slow burn of Perry's midlife depression, is a powerful portrait of a marriage holding its own against the weight of difficult past and a still more difficult present. (Sept.)