Secret understandings : a novel /

Shelagh Jackman lives an exquisite life--she's monied, an artist, the wife of a federal judge in New Haven, the mother of two successful children in their mid-twenties. Shelagh's father was a famous art historian, her mother immensely wealthy; she lives in a pair of townhouses made into one; her friends are Yale faculty elite, cultured and well-spoken. But there's a glioma, a tumor, growing beyond remedy in Shelagh's brain--and she has made the decision not to tell anyone (even her fine, truly sympathetic husband) that she'll be dead in little more than months. Her secret is entrusted only to a gynecologist friend--who, ironically, once molested her during an office exam: his shame ensures his silence. And the gynecologist subplot is the chief plot mechanism in this primarily plotless novel, a contrivance that isn't made especially smooth or plausible. Still, such a flaw is a minor distraction here--because Philipson (The Wallpaper Fox, A Man In Charge) is rightly taken up with illustrating an almost Jamesian woman's wise, brave end. Shelagh finds that dying in secret makes her into a judge of others, an actress, a victim--all contingent on her private new vantage point. She wants to make grand gestures--huge money gifts to her children, farewell letters to her friends--but finds she can't do more than affirm what she's had and has, her diary serving as a pool of introspection. (""You must live as if your life were infinite, endless, and your powers, unendangered, at their peak. You must live imagining the Ideal, so as not to be done in by Truth."") A largely actionless but still thematically resonant book, rich with civilized atmospheres--in which Philipson draws believable people who are both helpless and affectingly decent. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.