Fault Lines

...Spouses want to love each other truly, they want marriage to work even after they have been through ones that haven't...

...his head contains far more careful observation and reflection on life than is likely even in the most precocious six-year-old...

...This is a book about people who, like most of us, are capable of big mistakes and who, even in pursuit of forgiveness or in the act of attempting to heal those who are hurt, sometimes make things worse instead of better...

...James Carroll also treats a subject which will clearly be a main preoccupation of the generation that turns forty during this decade...

...We are, for better or worse, living through a period in which people are struggling to understand the nature of human generativity and the existential consequences, of being parents as well as spouses...

...Hooking things up, of course, is the business of religion and the themes of its perennial task undergird Carroll's work...

...Dolan also took his brother's place in bed with Eddie before his decade-long exile in the cold darkness of the country that gave him refuge but not a home...

...they want things hooked up again into a circuit of meaning that has suddenly become urgently important once more...

...After the death of his brother his sister-in-law had mothered his posthumous child, become a successful writer and married famous actor Cheney McCoy...

...Carroll's story explores broken lives, wrong judgments, the cruel harshness of too easy love, and the moral pressure that invades the universe when we recognize the marks we leave on each other every day...

...It is a book about the faults that are, for all of us, the crooked lines spoken of by Claudel, through which we make our way toward unlikely and unexpected redemption.cted redemption...

...He is perceived by and means something quite different for his mother, his uncle, and his stepfather, all of whom are so caught up in salvaging their pasts that they cannot see him very clearly for himself...

...The questions that arise transcend those about the individual fates of the leading characters...

...David Dolan, former war protestor, ends his long exile in Sweden to find the country greatly changed...

...Having filled a vast and airy canvas with the colorful characters of Mortal Friends, Carroll has chosen a more restricted and more demanding background for this very Catholic exploration of our sinful condition and our varied attempts at redemption and salvation...

...His characters represent the bright, wounded generation that lost itself in the evil cloud of the Vietnam war, in the years when assassinations and upheavals of every sort gave an apocalyptic cast to modern life, in the days when, perversely enough, liberation seemed at hand...

...Many are attempting to pick up their lives again and to make them whole by a return to what appear to be more conventional styles of life...

...As the book opens,, Bren has been taken by his mother to the East Coast, her first step toward divorce from the devouring, macho McCoy...

...The boy Bren seems to be the least successful of these engaging characterizations...

...Eugene Kennedy JAMES Carroll has written a miniature in which the lines that connect the lives of the main characters are drawn together so tautly that they almost shatter the small frame of the narrative...

...The book centers on these four characters and how the lines of their lives are finally winched together on an island off Maine with a dramatic intensity that almost overwhelms the theological issues that are the core of Carroll's and so many serious writers' concern...

...All this is evoked, with remarkable effect, on a small stage surrounded by forces of nature, forest, and tides that threaten to move in and retake it at any moment...

...This is a catholic novel in the richest sense of that phrase because it addresses itself to profoundly human issues, to conscience and responsibility, to the factso many would like to ignore, that everything in our relationships with each other makes a difference, that at close quarters with each other there is no vague refuge beyond moral referent "in which nobody else is hurt...

...After almost fifteen years of confusion and experimentation in life-styles many men and women, after the battering of a divorce and the failure of indifference as a mode of human relationship, are searching anew for values on which they can build more satisfying lives for themselves and their children...

...This does not destroy him, however, as the centerpiece of everyone's concern...

...The latter, who uses his art'in his life as much as his life in his art, legally adopts the boy who is named Bren...

...He wants to contact his sister-in-law Eddie, onetime accomplice in helping him escape in his brother's clothes - the brother who was to die in the Vietnam war that was David's outrage and cause...

...All of this is managed with considerable narrative skill and counterpoint, as in the contrasts between McCoy in Richard III and in real life...

...It is no small achievement to cause a reader to inspect the ragged edges of these lives to discover meanings that may not be immediately apparent, and to survey one's own for a more accurate sense of true moral courage...