A Selfish Woman

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 24 SEPT 2001

In succinct, often somberly beautiful language, Brookhouse (Running Out, etc.) writes about a breast cancer survivor, Caroline, and her yearlong relationship with Gabe, a much younger man. Caroline, an adjunct English professor at a small college, has just recovered from a mastectomy when Gabe is assigned to be her assistant. Her new breast feels foreign, and she's deeply unsure of her femininity, but Gabe is clearly attracted to her, and she slips into an affair with him. Brookhouse captures Caroline's unsettling mix of emotions remorse, arousal, guilt, defiance without pandering or indulging in sentimentality, although Gabe and Caroline's sex life is described in perhaps unnecessary detail. Meanwhile, Caroline must choose sides in a plot against a new African-American professor when his qualifications are called into question, a jealous ex of Gabe's threatens to expose his relationship with Caroline, and Caroline must help unravel the mystery of what happened the night Gabe's famous poet father committed suicide, with his son in the room. The twists and turns are subtly crafted, and the novel retains its elegiac pace until the final chapters, which are more hurried. Despite the winding course of events, plot is less important to this novel than Brookhouse's success at capturing Caroline's acute sensibility to the passing of seasons outside her rural home, made all the more vivid and poignant by her scrape with death.