Miriam's Healing (Footprints from the Bible)

Rating:
Summary: A new generational voice, agift for dialogue and wordplay.
Review: Most first novelists emerge from their egg like wet and wobbly goslings, fuzzy-headed, stumbling a bit, seeking a relatively safe path in the large webbed footsteps of successful authors who have gone before them. Not this author! Jennifer Reilly has her own unique and innovative style, a hybrid cross of prose and poetry, and an otterlike skill with puns and wordplay. Like a pelican, she dives headfirst into the pool of language, emerging triumphantly with morsels of metaphors, samples of similes, and snacks of symbolism packed into her dripping, expandable bill. She has a devastating gift for dialogue and characterization, and many of her passages sparkle and linger like Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine," capturing a mood, a moment, a relationship, a soul. Reilly describes a world of bright and articulate young people in their twenties--authors, artists, singer-songwriters, etc. Birth and regeneration themes permeate her work. Her characters all struggle to be reborn, to cut umbilical restraints, and to give birth to their art. They seek cleansing, renewal, space, deliverance, freedom from the rough bonds of traumatic childhoods or the velvet ties of suburban tranquility. They fight to "stay awake," to "feel the push and pull." They "know their fredom" like they "know their unborn child...before conception." They seek to make amends for betrayals and self-betrayals. They recapitulate a common generational struggle--"when you're a teenager...you don't know who you are. Your mid-twenties you KNOW who you are--you just don't know what you want to DO about it." Reilly's suburban landscape is blighted by mega-malls, lumbering sports utility vehicles, excessive signage signifying nothing, and most horrible of all, those dreaded ORANGE CONES which dot ubiquitous roadside construction sites. In a seriocomic rant, Reilly ignores their superficial resemblance to dunce caps--they are far more ominous. If you peer up through their bottoms, aren't they more like black holes, contracting into a vortex, a pinpoint of nothingness, ready to swallow both life and art, slowing down every photon of light in an eternal traffic jam on a cosmic Long Island Expressway? Yet, while her characters' eyes may be jaundiced, they learn to overcome their chronic fatigue and their philisophical hepatitis, and they do it through wonder, playfulness, creativity, forgiveness, art, and love.