cover image Ths Giants, Let Thm Rise

Ths Giants, Let Thm Rise

Erika Duncan. Schocken Books Inc, $14.95 (184pp) ISBN 978-0-8052-4000-9

On a spook-laden Halloween night, Melanie travels from her digs to her mother's house, which from the portentousness of the language and conjured-up memories might properly be located in Birnam Wood. Instead, Melanie emerges in Forest Hills, where her psychoanalyst mother, Laura, lives with her lesbian loverherself the first wife of Melanie's dead father, a failed musician whose aspirations and life were snuffed out by the narcissistic Laura. Melanie's one love has been the giant Gabriel, who turned out to be impotent, an apparent result of his giantism, another being the soft bones that signal early death. It becomes clear that Gabriel, a painter whose canvases had bestowed great beauty upon Melanie, is a symbol for the artists she presently gathers around her, each trying to find and preserve one transcendental moment. The novel is marred not only by overwriting but by its non-credible characterizations. Duncan wrote A Wreath of Pale White Roses. February