cover image The Measures Between Us

The Measures Between Us

Ethan Hauser. Bloomsbury, $25 (400p) ISBN 978-1-62040-115-6

New York Times editor Hauser’s high-reaching, affecting debut novel chronicles three families in the Boston suburbs as they face personal crises. Vincent Pareto, a high school woodworking teacher, and his wife, Mary, care for their 22-year-old daughter, Cynthia, who has moved back home after breaking up with her boyfriend in California. The Paretos, worried about Cynthia’s depression, send her to a top-line psychiatric hospital on the advice of Dr. Henry Wheeling, a young psychologist teaching at Boston University and Vincent’s former student. In the meantime, Henry’s pregnant wife Lucinda, feeling “suffocated,” decides to visit an old college roommate in El Paso while Henry carries on an affair with Samantha Webster, one of his graduate students. Hope slowly begins to reenter these characters’ lives, with Cynthia, after leaving psychiatric care, being hired as a babysitter by Sam Newell—a single parent struggling to raise an autistic son, Brandon, after his wife Alice’s suicide. Mary happens to meets Alice’s father, Tom Slater, at church, and the two form a close but platonic bond. Cynthia’s battle with depression provides the multithreaded narrative’s most heart-wrenching scenes, while a torrential rainstorm provides a dramatic backdrop for the various storylines to play out. Agent: Eleanor Jackson, Markson Thoma Literary Agency. (July)