I had been living alone again--had been for

nearly a year--when 1 learned that my kid had

set hi mselfonfire. So begins the story of Earl

Dimes, a management consultant by trade and

a novelist by calling, whose carefully orches-

trated life comes apart at the seams. Riveting

as narrative, achingly true in its emotional

impact, it is a vibrant, tragicomic tale of one

man s awakening to the emptiness of forty years

of an emotionally guarded existence.

Earl, born in Maine to Jack and Nola Dimes,

has learned early the lesson of emotional self-

protection, for his parents self-absorption

effectively shuts out him and his brother

Richie. As Earl grows up, however, and mar-

ries into the ebullient Italian-American

Stephano family of Long Island, the lesson, we

see, has terrible consequences. His marriage to

Linda stumbles along for fifteen years and

produces one son--Keefer. Earl does well in

business, becoming financially secure, and

even manages to publish a well-regarded novel.

But these "successeS do not produce hap-

piness, for he cannot connect emotionally with

his wife and son. It s as though Earl lives his

life behind a wall of plate glass, safe, he

believes, from the vulnerability that is the

inevitable result of giving oneself fully to

others.

The glass wall is shattered abruptly when

Linda throws him out after his one act of

infidelity--one of the funniest scenes in recent

fiction.Earl s well-ordered world fails apart and

he loses everything--his lucrative job, his

carefully built-up fortification of creature com-

forts, and, most painful of all, access to Keefer.

Using any stratagem he can think of, Earl

tries to piece his life together again and to make sense of it.