Working through the flaws

Edgarian, Carol. Three Stages of Amazement. New York: Scribner, 2011.

After all the whining I did recently about narcissistic fiction, this book might have worried a bit when I picked it up. It needn't have. Although the characters and their trials are relatively everyday, the way the story is executed is far from standard.

In Three Stages of Amazement, we meet the members of a storm-tossed clan: a husband and wife who deal with a struggling business, fractured family relationships, and one precocious and one very ill child; the wife's uncle and his wife, who, though related, seem like a completely different breed of powerful, empty human; the various people who serve these two families out of love or need. The richness of the story is also its main negative. Do real people experience this much turmoil in one year?

That may not matter. Like the film sequence with a hundred sunrises on fast-forward, the pain may be packed in for effect. Late in the story, one character tells Lena (the first wife above) about his grandmother: "she was always telling us, in her way, to make the best of things. To be tough. 'Life is a chipped cup,' she'd say. 'There's no fixing. You just learn to drink around.'" These characters' turbulent year helps them learn to drink from that cup, and it draws from the reader both a tear and a glimmer of hope.

Rating: ***