The Dolphin Smiles

Salvage's ornately written debut follows the emotional evolution of Pamela, a depressive 32-year-old doctor whose backward-looking introspection exasperates her lover Bruna, a muscular, authoritarian Cuban woman she's dated since medical school. Salvage introduces the pair on a flight from New York to a medical symposium in San Francisco; their relationship is unraveling and comes undone when Pamela meets Martine Lourmel, a mysterious, attractive French doctor who soon becomes Pamela's obsession. Salvage interrupts the story of Pamela and Martine's blossoming affair with a long chapter detailing Pamela's therapy sessions, as she wrestles with the fact of her sister Iris's schizophrenia and her mother's death a decade earlier. With a bit of unlikely plotting, Salvage arranges an astounding coincidence, and Pamela and Martine discover they have more in common than just mutual attraction. Their visit to Iris in a Santa Cruz mental hospital provides a melancholy, graceful conclusion. Though Salvage brings a lush, emotive poetry to his first novel, he omits the narrative momentum that would make this a real erotic page-turner.