"Gracefully intertwining two love stories, of a man and a woman from vastly different worlds, Karen Latuchie reveals how passion compounded by pride will lead us astray. With a candor that is rigorous yet tender, she has crafted a wise and heartbreaking novel."
In a debut novel more notable for its detailed exploration of the complexities of love than its plot, storyteller Latuchie interweaves two narratives of infidelity and desire. Nina, a mechanic turned maker of Rube Goldbergesque "contraptions," and Tony, a painter, have been together for 20 tumultuous years in a relationship fraught with passion and plagued by affairs. At their Pennsylvania cottage, she reflects on her past as Bill, an elderly neighbor, tells Nina his own tale: years ago, he slept with his brother's French wife, was exiled from the area, worked on an oil rig in Saudi Arabia, returned for his father's funeral and lusted after his niece. Bill's story proves more riveting than poor Nina's, despite her secret pregnancies and abortions and her conflicted feelings for her flirtatious lover. Through elegant flashbacks, Latuchie recounts Nina and Tony's move from New York City to Vermont, where Tony landed a teaching job. Nina hates to leave the city but "she could almost believe that the power of their attraction to each other, the brashness of it, the intense pleasures in satisfying it, could be sufficiently strong glue to keep them together if everything else failed." The glue sticks, but as the years pass Nina and Tony repeatedly reenact painful patterns, wearying for readers and characters alike. As Nina's friend, Chris finally snaps: "I don't have time to fret the minutiae of my inner life . Maybe you should try it." But if Nina's fretting grows old, her relationship with Bill intrigues: "his past offered in exchange for her mesmerized attention to the present." Agent, Sarah Burnes. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Tony is an artist, Nina an auto mechanic. Though both are New York City natives, they move to rural Vermont when Tony lands a college teaching job there. Nina feels completely out of her element and has a long, hard struggle to rearrange her thinking. Eventually, she settles in and proves to be an artist in her own right. However, life with Tony, in Vermont and later in Pennsylvania, is stormy. Bill, an elderly neighbor in Pennsylvania, invites Nina to dinner and tells her the story of his affair with his sister-in-law. Nina is shocked at the revelation yet can't get the story out of her thoughts. The two stories of love and infidelity intertwine in an intrigue that spans 50 years. In her first work, Latuchie uses well-rounded characters and a compelling story to create a vibrant picture of parallel lives, examining love, passion, dependency, and the long-term effects of a single moment in time. Recommended for public libraries.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
A first outing, wonderfully streamlined and unsentimental, about a couple of big-city refugees in rural Pennsylvania who conduct a vicious relationship skirmish. Some relationship novels simply spin their wheels, offer minute analysis of the most mundane lives, adding homespun wisdom and the occasional uplifting, ready-made resolution. And some are like this one, which, though resolutely a novel of relationships-of people rather than story-manages to offer up a unique tale of love and the battlefields it is fought on. Set in a small Pennsylvania town that seems unchanged by time, it tells of Nina, a designer of oddly engineered, Rube-Goldberg-like machines who is locked into a decades-long love/hate relationship with her boyfriend Tony, a painter and professor. Nina's encounter with Bill, an older man who lives nearby watching over a farm, opens up a can of worms between herself and Tony. The two of them have been playing a passive-aggressive cheating-revenge game for some years now, and when Bill unexpectedly opens up to Nina about an affair he had back in the 1950s with his brother's French wife, it awakens a heretofore-unknown level of hostility in Nina toward the flirty, philandering Tony. Happily for readers, Latuchie spends a decent amount of time flashing away from Nina's neurotic present (she's an interesting and sharp character, but, as her friends keep noting, she has a tendency to go on in "fucking, endless patterns"). The narrative presents a latticework of stories from Nina and Tony's past as well as Bill's, especially about the aftermath of his affair and the collateral damage it caused his family. The only detail that doesn't quite work is the title's "honey wall," a nestof hidden bees made to serve as a belabored metaphor for the erotic repercussions of illicit affairs. Still, a collection of small, perfectly chosen moments, seamlessly woven together. Agent: Sarah Burnes/Burnes & Clegg
"Redolent with apprehension and sudden longing....The deeper values of the book lie in the challenges that face all the characters and ourselves: are passion and honesty—about love, about the world—finally incompatible?"
