Open Water

January 2, 1995
Although it deals with pain and dying, this absorbing new novel by Flook (Reckless Wedding), with its three bedeviled protagonists, proves full of verve. Deliciously oddball Rennie Hopkins, a wraith with white hair flying, stockpiles a candy store's worth of high-tech painkillers to ease her cancer agony. Soon she's sharing pills and suppositories with her trouble-prone stepson, Willis Pratt. Just discharged from the Navy as psychologically unfit, Willis has arrived home with a broken wrist (which gets excruciatingly rebroken). Then newly divorced Holly Temple, on probation for having set fire to her unfaithful husband's bed, moves in next door, trying to patch together her shattered life. With a natural affinity for one another, Willis and Holly soon become lovers; both hover around Rennie. Meanwhile, Willis and his goofy buddy Fritz engage in bizarre criminal deals (such as delivering rare exotic birds to a ``smut king'') in order to build up a fund for Rennie to ensure that she can stay in her house by the sea (her smarmy son, Munro, is trying to hustle her into a home for the terminally ill). Setting the novel in Newport, R.I., Flook incorporates the sea as a potent presence, using boating and fishing as significant scene and plot elements to steer her story gracefully and with humor to its satisfying conclusion.

January 1, 1995
Flook's first novel, Family Night (Pantheon, 1993), received a PEN/Hemingway Foundation Special Citation. Her new work is the story of Willis Pratt, a young man whose life is foundering. Having been dishonorably discharged from the navy, Willis is now called home to care for his dying stepmother, Rennie, who raised him after the strange deaths of his mother and father. Their relationship is complex, and it's obvious to Rennie that Willis is the one in need of help. While Rennie grows increasingly weaker, Willis becomes stuck in a downward spiral of drugs and crime. Thrown into this mix is Holly, their newly divorced neighbor, who is on parole for torching her ex-husband's bed. The tension between these characters as they struggle to get their lives in order is intriguing, although the sudden resolution of Willis's problems after Rennie's death seems unlikely. Best suited for academic or very large public library fiction collections.-Kathy Ingels Helmond, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L.

November 1, 1994
This is a novel with death as its theme, with characters who seem perpetually stunned by the evidence of their own mortality, and yet, for all that, it emits a cheerful if bent humor. Willis Pratt has a headful of horror: he witnessed the freakish death of his mother when he was 13, and he's never fully recovered, drifting into thievery and drug abuse. He's come home to Newport, Rhode Island, to nurse his stepmother, who's dying of cancer, and he soon becomes involved with the loving but emotionally damaged woman who lives next door. Lurching from one comic misadventure to another, Willis ultimately finds a small measure of relief through his desperate, touching attempt to bury his stepmother at sea. Flook, also the author of "Family Night" (1993), writes in a marvelous, jittery prose that allows us to see her complex lead character as a drug-addicted petty thief and also as an ethereal, disturbed man who is haunted by what he has seen. ((Reviewed November 1, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)