A Big Storm Knocked It Over

A Big Storm Knocked It Over Laurie Colwin (HarperCollins, $22) Colwin's final novel, published nearly a year after her death from a heart attack at the age of 48, is bursting with life, filled with moments of such tender happiness and vignettes of such lovely domesticity as to make her devoted readers miss her all the more. Once again (as in Another Marvelous Thing and Goodbye Without Leaving), her terrain is the landscape of relationships-between lovers, spouses, friends, parents, and children. And once again, she works in miniature, embroidering beautiful stitches into a small, familiar canvas. This time the heroine is Jane Louise Parker, a book designer who, like many deracinated Colwin women, is surprised, in her late 30s, by happiness in marriage, pregnancy, and motherhood and who wonders nervously and repeatedly at the fragility of human connection. ''(People) were positively rich with living. Often this thought was a source of exultant happiness to Jane Louise. Often it left her with a pounding headache.'' Jane Louise's emotional progress is paralleled by that of her iconoclastic best friend, Edie, who perfectly times her own pregnancy so that the two women can share fears and dreams and mutual, articulate amazement that they had ever survived all childhood traumas and adult stresses, all headstrong mistakes and self-destructive urges, to reach their present state of marvelous everydayness. Nobody could track the tiny details of domestic intimacy better than Colwin-she was the master of the described cup of coffee-and nobody better understood the radiance embedded in the ordinary. In its way, A Big Storm Knocked It Over is the sum of all Colwin's recurring themes, told once more and finally by a writer with a gift for making her readers feel radiant, too. A- -Lisa Schwarzbaum

You Might Also Like

• Book Review A Big Storm Knocked It Over