cover image Rose Reason

Rose Reason

Mary Flanagan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P, $23.95 (388pp) ISBN 978-0-15-179015-9

In this uneven confessional novel, narrator Frances Mullen traces her life story from her Catholic girlhood in a Maine mill town to her bohemian existence in 1960s Manhattan to the English boarding house where she now works as a maid. After her mother's death, Frances is sent by her adored, ineffectual father to live with her aunt, a religious spinster. Upon her confirmation she takes the name Rose, hoping to take on a new identity, ``a magic garment to cover my sorrow.'' But in her efforts to transform herself she cannot overcome her persistent sense of abandonment, and as she grows older Rose continually pursues men who--like her father--will disappoint and leave her. Flanagan ( Trust ) powerfully evokes Rose's pinched life with the repressive Aunt Bernie, but the novel's second half unravels into strained and diffused emotions. Roland Miles, the sinister Englishman who eventually stirs the violence smoldering beneath Rose's passivity, is less a man than a metaphor for elusive love. Like too much of this novel, he is a symbol in search of significance. (Sept.)