Amazon.com Review
Sharon Oard Warner offers a key to her ambitious debut,
Deep in the Heart, in one character's experiment in "intentional pentimento": "Pentimento referred to the way an old painting sometimes found its way to the surface of a newer one, rising like a phantom. Back when canvas was hard to come by, artists often whited out their less successful pieces and started over. But the old painting wasn't always gone. Sometimes, bits and pieces of it reappeared, the old forcing itself on the new." In a novel ostensibly about a woman's decision to have an abortion and its dramatic reverberations, the past remains as live and frangible and menacing as the present. Penny and Helen, two women on whom the story turns, both live in Austin, Texas. And though they never meet, each one's experiences reflect and comment on the other's with an understated complexity.
Penny is a reluctant member of the Gospel Fellowship led by Dr. Bill, an evangelical minister who is one part Garth Brooks, one part Billy Graham. He enlists his acolytes in an antiabortion protest that begins at the same clinic where Helen chooses to end a pregnancy that at 40 took her by surprise and for which she feels ill-suited. She does so without consulting her husband, Carl, and when he arrives too late to stop her, Dr. Bill finds an unwitting martyr for his campaign. The author refuses to take sides though. It would be impossible when life as she perceives it is as defiantly layered as it is changeable: Helen expertly parents teenagers in her role as assistant principal yet has not recovered from the loss of her own mother at age 16. Penny, still a virgin at 23 and raised by her formidable grandmother, thinks of love as a distant and unknowable commodity, the same way she views her mother and father respectively, and is baffled by Dr. Bill's persistent attentions. Even the minister's sanctimoniousness is steeped in real loss. Every moment is freighted with others. As casually as Deep in the Heart seems to proceed--taking you from a mall to a girl's high school bathroom with humor and affection--it is firm in its message of tolerance and its perception that even destruction and everyday accidents can be blessings. --Amy Grace Loyd
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
The complexity of the abortion issue transcends bumper-sticker slogans, this debut novel argues, and its author does well to avoid dogma as two women search for their personal truths in the reproductive rights debate. A soft-focus narrative, with multiple points of view, first gives voice to Hannah Solace, 39, a high school assistant principal who is pregnant for the first time. Her decision to have an abortion rather than to face parenthood is criticized by her husband, Carl, a sensitive artist and bookstore manager who desperately wants to be a father, and by her matronly sister Helen. A crusading fundamentalist minister, the flamboyant Dr. Bill forces the Solaces' private grief into the limelight after confronting Carl at the abortion clinic. He makes Hannah and Carl the subject of his Sunday sermon and sends his pro-life zealots to vandalize their home. Dr. Bill also courts Penny Reed, 23, a member of his congregation, who is just beginning to form her views of life and religion. Penny's absent mother and overbearingly religious grandmother both struggled with unwanted pregnancies, and the young woman wrestles with the ghosts of their past decisions. When she meets Carl, she learns to question the easy moral supremacy that Dr. Bill and his crusade advertises. Warner has a gift for detailed, evocative writing and careful characterizations, but her plot feels contrived, weighed down by obvious twists of fate and symmetrical turning points. Just when Hannah and Carl's marriage falls apart, Carl finds a friend in Penny; Hannah's publicly condemned abortion is juxtaposed with an unwed high school student's equally controversial decision to keep her baby. One plot thread that does stand out within the overdetermined schema concerns Carl's difficult position as a would-be father who grieves his unborn child while struggling to understand his wife's choice. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
