Jennifer Maxwell: Sharing Blood

By RHONDA BARTLE

Sometimes it's the plot that gets you to the end of a book. Sometimes it's the prose. With Jennifer Maxwell's second novel, Sharing Blood, it's the fresh and vivid writing that will drag you, neither kicking nor screaming, to the final page.

"The doctors have prescribed palliatives - for us, not him. Thick, syrupy words for the seismic upheaval in Earnest's chest; for the anticipated aftershocks, the damming of vital streams, the days, weeks, months that he has left; great mouthfuls of Latin and Greek which Shelley gulps down greedily and translates into rage."

Pick a page, any page.

"That night they made love, Earnest with the single-minded attention to detail of a man who cannot do two things at once and Gwyneth noisily, weeping and whooping and whinnying, adding to the misery of Shelley, down the hall. Afterwards they fell apart, stiff and straight with their hands formally linked, as if they were skating on vertical ice, and Gwyneth wept, and Earnest stared, unseeing, at the ceiling. He knew about women's tears. He knew that women did not weep only for grief or self-pity as men do, but for everything: for terror or lust or rage or tiredness or disgust. So, knowing and not knowing, he simply held her hand.

"But Gwyneth, as any woman with ears could have heard, wept for what was lost and what would never be: for her child, and for the husband she did not have. And in the night, dry and thin from the tears she had shed, she slipped through the needle, began unravelling the garment she had made of her life."

Yet for all that elegant narrative, Sharing Blood is peopled with grim characters. Earnest, a noxious weed inspector, is a wimp, his wife Gwyneth a shrew, his daughter Shelley a harridan. His son Barney is dying of an obscure and long-lettered disorder. His mother Leah, once the all-seeing matron of a girls' school, is mad with Alzheimer's disease. The one engaging character is perhaps Uncle Wolf - an ex-army, hirsute Barry Crump.

"Uncle Wolf cooked chops and fried potatoes for breakfast, and made mashed tinned pea and mutton sandwiches for lunch. He smoked. All the time, wet brownish-yellow things that drooped in the middle of his beard or from behind his ear or between his brownish-yellow finger and thumb. He whistled, softly between his teeth when he was doing things like the dishes, or loudly like the screaming School House Zip."

But every boy needs a hero and every man needs to believe he can become one and it's Earnest's attempt at recreating a single heroic season for Barney that gives Sharing Blood its heart.

A clever and absorbing book that doesn't follow the usual lines.

HarperCollins

$24.95