The Orphan Game

The protagonist of Darby's notable first novel, Maggie Harris, looks back at 1965, the year she was 16, with a hushed nostalgia shadowed by the pain of what then seemed a ""ruined"" life. Maggie's parents, whose pathologies will make readers ache for the girl, are a formula for disaster. Mother Marian is a seamstress, the daughter of an alcoholic. Father Jim is obsessed with making a real estate coup--and both his abrasiveness and self-absorption make him a damaging parent. When Maggie's boyfriend enlists in the 101st Airborne and leaves (she does not tell him of her fear that she is pregnant), the only comfort she finds at home is in the companionship of her quirky, sensitive 14-year-old brother, Jamie. Soon she seeks refuge with Evelyn Rumsen, an Auntie Mame-type whose house smells of patchouli and whose years of living unmarried with her ballroom dancing partner have made her the black sheep of Jim's strictly religious family. Maggie's pregnancy turns out not to be the true tragedy for the Harrises, and Darby performs a fine philosophical turn grappling with the power of accidents and carelessness set against ""the slow drift of small influences."" Loose construction diminishes the strength of the narrative: Darby unnecessarily incorporates late switches in narrator and person, and extraneous incidents and characters. Her prose is tightly controlled, however, sometimes microscopically observant, sometimes musical. Her attention to every detail of the period is faultless--from the novelty clams that bloomed in water to the boys who signed up to go to Da Nang with no sense of what awaited them. And the scene when Maggie returns to a drunk, thoughtless father is alone worth the price of the book. Such virtues and bursts of brilliance provide evidence that this accomplished short-story writer can spin memorable fiction at length. Agent, Emma Sweeney. (May) FYI: Darby's short fiction has won the Bennett Cerf Prize for fiction.