Strings Attached

This heavy-handed first novel examines a young woman's troubled childhood with her alcoholic father, a history that echoes throughout her adult love life. Abandoned by her mother, Charlee grew up hanging out with her father in one dim, smoky bar after another in the cities and seaside villages of Quebec and New England. Acting grown-up while sipping a Shirley Temple, her earliest friendships were with barmaids in dives where her father's pals would grope her under the table without his noticing. These squalid settings possess a stark, unapologetic grit, and Walley is at her best when she describes the various pubs' dark, otherworldly atmospheres. Yet the mood dissolves under the tedious reflection that characterizes much of the novel, an awkward combination of strained lyricism and the earnest idiom of self-help (""I'm trying to shape my own chaos""). Charlee's story closely follows the trajectory of recovery narratives: her father is gruff, caustic and difficult, but since he's her only family, she's torn between her dogged love for him and her rage over the years of neglect. As an adult, she struggles with her own drinking problem and has a tortured relationship with Peter, an aimless and needy alcoholic whom she can't bring herself to leave. Scenes from Charlee's youth juxtaposed with first-person accounts of her affair with Peter fail to make the story multidimensional or dynamic. The novel circles anxiously around the same scenes, in which Charlee is desperate for love from her father or fighting with the jealous, wounded Peter. Walley establishes the basic tenor of these relationships early in the narrative, but consistently restating the main issues does not give them further depth or add richness or complexity to the characters. (Nov.)