The Waiting Room

April 1, 1989
Morris's last three titles ( Crossroads ; The Bus of Dreams ; the nonfiction Nothing to Declare ) reveal a taste for journeys, actual and symbolic. This sagely provocative novel opens with Zoe Coleman returning by train to her Midwest home in response to an urgent summons from the clinic where her drug-ruined brother Badger is institutionalized. On the trip, Zoe recognizes that she's ``in love with distance. With trips across great continents and travel to the moon.'' But like the other women of the novel, Zoe is forced to idle in antechambers, bars and corridors, waiting for men to come back or just to notice them. A dermatologist, Zoe comprehends the body scientifically, while hungering for some stable physical intimacy. Much of the novel reaches into the past to delineate three generations of women: Naomi, Zoe's Russian immigrant grandmother cheated of her only love; June, her mother, whose husband Cal went to WW II a young, strong photographer and came back a stranger; Zoe herself, whose lover Hunt died in another war. A highly accomplished storyteller, Morris captures with humor and perspicacity the complex ways of women with men and with each other. BOMC and QPBC New Voice selections.

May 15, 1989
Morris's novel opens as Zoe returns to her hometown by train to visit her brother, hospitalized for apparently drug-related mental problems. Her initial, uneasy meeting with her mother is a point of departure for the family history that Morris provides in satisfying detail: grandmother Naomi fled the pogroms of Russia only to lose her beloved first husband to an absurd death on their wedding day; mother June married for love but lost her husband to the despair he experienced after returning from World War II. Though these characters are well drawn, and their relationships intriguing, the language is not quite vivid enough to bring the novel to life. Still, there are gratifying moments, for Morris deals forthrightly with issues of quiet signficance, testing one family's delicate balance of love and misunderstanding as she goes.-- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 1989 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.