cover image Familiar Heat

Familiar Heat

Mary Hood. Alfred A. Knopf, $25 (451pp) ISBN 978-0-394-58658-8

Sensitively exploring how love, memory and fate may influence one another (but offering no easy equations), this intricate first novel by Hood (author of two story collections, And Venus Is Blue and How Far She Went) charts the fortunes of more than a dozen residents of a small town on the Florida coast. The central character, Faye Parry, is a newlywed whose marriage to ``the Captain,'' an older man who operates a charter boat, is jeopardized when she is kidnapped and brutalized by thieves--an event her laconic, macho husband responds to by being flagrantly unfaithful. The plottings of the local priest and Faye's mother-in-law, as well as of the Captain's more sensitive brother, to reunite the couple comprise a good portion of the narrative; and so readers may find it unsettling that the Captain, though never quite redeemed from being an unsavory, selfish character, is imbued with the power and means to grant Faye's ultimate happiness. Still, Hood's talent as a storyteller is beyond doubt, as is the power of her unique, almost staccato, prose style, which beautifully renders the odd emotional rhythms of these characters' lives. (Sept.)