This multi-strandard story might have been compelled had it been a third shorter,but as it is,it meanders on for far too
long.Following the lives of six main characters over a period of several months, the story focuses on themes of romance,family,children and childlessness in a way that was probably intended to the broad ranging but ends up tendious.Successful bakery
owner Greenie is married to striggling psycotherapist Alan; among his patients are a gay couple,Stephen and Gordie,who are contemplating adoption.Gordie gets involved with Walter ,a restauranteur and close friend of Greenie''s ,who has preciptously decided to relocate to New Mexico to become the governor''s personal chef.She takes along her five year old ,Gorge ,but leaves behind her husband,Alan,who is none too pleased about this but who is afraid of rocking the boat too much.After all,the marriage has been unsteady of late.
Sounds like a soap opera?Heck, we have not even gotten started.Greenie has an affair with a chiildhood flame when she discovers that A lan done something similar ;local bookshop owner Fenno becomes involved with Walter after Gordie dumps him.Meanwhile, the brain damaged Saga stumbles through her days,remembering what she can,struggling to keep her place in the family home with kindly Uncle Marsden and his bickering trio of children.While mooning after Fenno,she joins his animal rescue organization.Walter invites his teenaged nephew ,Scott,to live with him,in a sort of pretend adoption.These characters '' stories crisscross one another and become ever more entangled,which might be interesting if the characters were not so mind-numbingly trivial.Walter,the restaurant owner,is engaging enough and the handy-capped Saga is intermittently quite engaging.The others are simply dull.Before Alan went out that evening ,he checked on Saga''s peony plant ,as if it might have been stolen or taken flight.He
opened the window and reached out to feel the soil in the pot.It was damp.He closed the window and just stood there awhile ,staring at the plant ,as if there were something else he could do for his welfare.He noticed that the tip of each stalk had opened into a feathering of tiny leaves,olive stained with crimson.The colour details are vivid enough,but cannot hide the fact that the author has just devoted an entire paragraph--84 words!--to describe a character looking at a plant.
With seventy pages left in this epic and perhaps grasping for some sort of significance ,the author introduces the event of 9/11 .Suddenly ,the melodrama is ramped up a notch, as athe plane crash,towers fall and characters go missing.Its a cheap trick,but one we''d best get used to;writers reaching for the easy shock of real-world events to lend their flimsy,self-absorbed characters some kind of significance.