Customer Reviews

The Inner Life of Objects

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The Inner Life Of Objects is a tour through the lives and eccentricities of five memorable characters caught up in the Zoetic Society's exploration of the paranormal. Opal Kirshbaum is an aspiring actress; there's Opal's painter husband, Sol; Geneva Lamp is an English Ph.D.; Poppy Greengold is a single mother into reading Goddess books; and guest lecturer Abel Moore is a visiting psychic whose predictions are accurate 33 percent of the time. The Inner Life Of Objects is a novel drawing upon occultism and parapsychology, exploring our secret selves, seeking the hidden meaning of the objects in our lives, and revealing the extraordinary and sometimes surprising connections between our selves and our objects. Lyrical, poetic, engaging, embedded with insights, and the occasional flair of literary inspiration, The Inner Life Of Objects is recommended reading for anyone with an interest in a great novel arising from an exploration into the nature of belief and the human condition.

This is a literary confection to delight. Not only does voice/authority runs through the book, but the principal characters are all interesting, engage the reader--from Opal, the investigator of New Age phenomena, Geneva the unpragmatic intellectual, a Yeats scholar, with life skipping her by, and Poppy, a feminist idealogue to an extent, unbalanced, comic, but with real life issues (the tragedy over her ex-lover, her youth, her baby) that give depth. Of course, the heart of the book is Abel Moore (A play on words here, with this question for the reader: is he "more able" than the rest of us. The novel builds in tension for his arrival, and the climax of the novel, that is, the issue of whether he will be able to demonstrate his "special powers." Can one tell the history of an object from feeling it? Do such people exist? Here's a novel of ideas (a la Huxley?), but of the New Age sort. Hats off to Ms. Combs!