O my darling : a novel /

Clark and Charlotte each bring baggage to their spur-of-the-moment marriage. Clark's mother suffered from mental illness, and his father eventually left her for his longtime mistress. Charlotte was adopted at age two, and as she moved into adulthood, she and her adoptive parents gradually drifted apart, as if they had never technically belonged to one another. Still, all seems to go well until Clark's mother commits suicide. After the funeral, Clark takes a job as a high-school guidance counselor in a nearby town; then, after he and Charlotte move to their dream house, their lives suddenly take a downward spiral. Clark sees shadows (or ghosts?) and soon finds himself nearly immobilized by a vague feeling of discontent. Charlotte feels as if she has been dropped into alien territory. It's like we live in a little diorama, she tells a neighbor. Gaige's debut, while short on plot, does provide an introspective, sometimes humorous look at how aspects from one's past can suddenly reemerge and pilot one's life in totally unexpected directions. --Deborah Donovan Copyright 2005 Booklist

Crystalline insights into the nature of love and flashes of narrative brilliance buoy a plot-deficient first novel about the strains of a young marriage. Clark and Charlotte have just moved into their first house, which is still inhabited by ghosts of other marriages. Isolated in their suburb, Charlotte nervously jokes, "[W]e live in a little diorama or something. Help, help! Let us out!" Clark is mourning the freedom of imagination that seems to have perished with his mother's recent suicide. Dead-on dialogue (" `You're alive!' she cried. `You jackass!' ") and moments of suburban absurdity (a public joyride on a lawn mower; the curious arrival of a nude travel magazine in the mailbox) impart the acute delight more often found in short stories. While the horror-story elements (disembodied voices; visible spirits) don't add up to much and the themes of apology and forgiveness don't fully edify, gorgeous snippets on love and marriage ("Marriage is the only punishment great enough to fit the crime of love") compensate. Gaige's precise wordplay, sharp dialogue and bite-sized themes might be better served in story form, but her novel often sparkles and delights. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Love, marriage, the whole damn thing--all spanned in a witty, tender first novel. After three years of marriage, Clark and Charlotte Adair have moved into their first home, "a normal house in a normal place," paid for by Clark's mother's bequest after she committed suicide. Although still in the delighted phase of their relationship, the two have learned enough about each other to sense limits and disappointments. Charlotte, an orphan, fears abandonment above all and wants no children. Clark, "prone to nostalgia," has been imbued with some of his paranoid mother's colorful fantasies in lieu of a truer sense of adulthood. The purchase of the yellow house in Clementine is an opportunity for the two to settle down, but what about the rumors that previous owners fled the place? And how to explain the glimpsed figures and overheard voices first noted by Clark, then Charlotte? Gaige's beguilingly offbeat voice and appealing mix of humor and insight offer continual pleasures, and her story, woven together with that of the house, reaches high. Each chapter follows the discrete shape of a short story while also building on the troubling notion that there are indeed ghosts abroad--not only the seemingly ineradicable spirits at Quail Hollow Road but also the "persona" phantoms that dwell inside Clark and Charlotte. Conventional action is relatively minor: the dog escapes; Clark rescues a boy at the swimming pool and experiences a death rush of exhilaration. But the shifts in mood and the variations in the couple's power balance are just as telling. After a snowstorm, they have their biggest row, and Clark drives away. In the final pages, Gaige's usually unerring if unpredictable sense of narrative true north wavers, and chapters become ragged. Despite a final soft-centered swerve, however, the impression overall is of a limpid style and the peeling away of the comedy of intimacy to expose isolated souls. With a flavor of Lorrie Moore, graceful, bright, modern writing. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.