Left to Themselves

Life in small-town Ohio is closely circumscribed in this sensitive, meticulously rendered but finally unsatisfying first novel by award-winning story writer Grimm. The plot turns on a familial love triangle. Bony Cynthia, with her ``long old hair,'' lives in her grandparents' house with her son, Joey, and an apathetic, dimly drawn husband. Her boozing cousin Harry, with whom she is infatuated, sleeps at the house unless he has a woman on the string. Nowadays that woman is blond, withdrawn Lucette, who becomes pregnant. The older generation are dead, vanished or crazy; Lucette and Harry both have mumbling mothers whom they treat with glassy-eyed repugnance. Grimm creates exquisite vignettes--e.g., a ``home astrology party'' (``like Tupperware'') where tempers are tested--and adroitly builds up each character's isolation and emotional myopia: the keen awareness of one's skin, pulse, gut, sticky throat, clicking teeth; close-up shots of fingers twisting tea-bag strings, tapping at dials. While the novel is deftly wrought, such finickiness drains it of forward drive. Characters coast past one another, unable to engage, and the plot idles. Most problematic is the opaque, unmagnetic Harry, over whom Cynthia and Lucette are supposed rivals. Instead of forcing confrontations, Grimm brings on more minor characters and leaves the reader hungering for something to happen. (Apr.)