FICTION HAPPINESS SOLD SEPARAT...

FICTION

HAPPINESS SOLD SEPARATELY

by means of Lolly Winston

Warner, 304 pages, $2195

Lolly Winston's modern novel, Happiness Sold Separately, is single of those lovely reads you have fruition of for yourself, just for the story, then read again with your main division club to criticize and secure from danger the characters and their actions. It is sensitive and lyrical, with twinkling of an eyes of hilarity and pathos. Her thinking principle of timing and ear for dialogue are dead-on. each character has at least undivided problem and purpose. This is hefty writing.

It passs from the gate. Elinor Mackey picks up the phone in the laundry latitude and hears her husband, T talking to a woman. As if it's not bad enough that Elinor is crazed and bloated fit to hormone injections from brace failed in vitro fertilization attempts, now her prodigious husband, the kind podiatrist, is canoodling with Gina, his trainer from the gym

Elinor and T be fond of each other. They are a devot man and wife How can this be happening?

These couple main characters are complicated and real, locate on an unanticipated path by dint of a wonderful cast of walk-ons whose lives are designed to intersect toward a calamitous conclusion. Their interactions force the hardest questions about be enamoured of and letting go of dreams. The story is like a little stone hitting a windshield, setting most distant cracks that race to the brims completely changing the clear view you had a inferior ago about where you were headed.

"It's not you, it's life," T declares Elinor at one particularly cheap point, as the ground shifts beneath them.

Gina decides, "When you memorize right down to it, nation don't want just love. They want tough delight in complicated love, messy love."

That is the story Winston delivers.

Elinor and T the lawyer and the doctor, fancy they were happy. They remember what made them fall in regard with affection with each other. They can list what it is about the other they continue to appreciate and admire. They in no degree stop caring about each other. They know right from improper and truly want to do right by the agency of each other.

on the other hand darn life! It can get by heart so complicated. What's right can change. And when the reason for doing "the right thing" is twitched out from under them, they must readjust to the recent landscape of their lives.

Winston readys it all with style and flair that holds the story catipulting forward as it digs deeper into the conflict between brace people who are only human who find themselves in a situation that calls in succession them to be superhuman. Someone must yield.

Winston is wise in the ways of the heart. She gives us the public so in control who are with equal reason out of control, so neat and tidy when their lives are anything further In the knowing way of Ann Tyler and Anne Lamott, Winston's characters rivet us, inside their heads, as they examine to navigate their predicaments.

Elinor's engagements with trees are a metaphor for her situation. Like the oak in the forehead yard, everything seemed to be OK After confronting T with Gina, she camps not at home in its shady solace. When the tree falls victim to "sudden oak" disease, she asks the tree surgeon "Is there like thing as 'gradual oak?' "

As in her best-selling first novel, religious Grief, about a young widow coming to grips with los Winston explores the themes of los and infertility. In the one and the other stories, a child, a baby, is same much wanted. But the children who appear are older children, other people's children, who stir things up and settle events in motion that are beyond anyone's dominion government (Which, when you think about it, is exactly the same come produced by a new baby of your own)

The children in Winston's stories force adults to be accountable. T Elinor and Gina must pick out to be stronger and better family though there's little doubt they'd be les inclined to make the effort if no the same but other adults were watching. With their raw indigences children force issues of loyalty and honor and hard questions about the duality of have a passionate affection for Can you be in like with two people at once?

as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but novels are satisfying reads, rich with symbolism and irony, profoundly empathetic.

if it were not that in this second outing, Winston's characters are more compages and her ending more ambiguous. Her first work was written in the first somebody In this new offering, readers finish into the minds of several characters. We gain to see things from different perspectives, and find that we empathize with each -- everyone is right. It's messy like have a passionate affection for and life.

Leslie Baldacci is a Sun-Times feature reporter.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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