Until Your Heart Stops

Fine passages of psychological insight and lyrical prose are often vitiated by murky philosophizing and a suffocating blanket of angst in this first novel by McNally (whose collection Low-Flying Aircraft won a Flannery O'Connor Award). The suicide of an Arizona high school senior sets off frightened soul-searching and further violence among his fellow students and their teachers. McNally examines the events through the eyes of four characters: Joe ``Jazz'' Jazinski, the school's champion wrestler and surrogate father to his nine-year-old brother; Jazz's timid, legally blind girlfriend, Edith McCaw; alcoholic wrestling coach/driver-ed teacher Ray Morrison; and his lover, swimming coach/history teacher Jenna Williams. All of them are moody and self-absorbed, burdened by the past and bewildered or anguished about the directions of their lives. In endless interior monologues that sometimes seem to move in slow motion, they wonder about the possibility of love and commitment, meanwhile feeling sure that they will be left lonely and abandoned. McNally writes sensitively about the emotional limbo of adolescence and the inertia of middle age. But the prose veers unevenly from the flat transcriptions of inarticulate characters' thoughts to such pretentious statements as ``sleep is afraid of the darkness, which is why we have to close our eyes.'' McNally is adroit, however, at interweaving the details of their lives, slowly creating tension and building to a denouement of cautious affirmation. One hopes this gifted writer will improve his pacing and lighten his heavy hand. (Jan.)