Dexterity : a novel /

This novel takes place in a dirt-poor small town in upstate New York, and the characters are working-class whites who drive too fast, marry too young, and slap each other around. Ed and Ramona King's marriage, born in teenage passion, has deteriorated so badly that Ramona tries to run off, only to lose her hand in a freak automobile accident. Miserable, terrified of the physical burden of caring for their infant with her handicap, Ramona abandons him in a field and literally walks away. She has an intense affair with a bartender in a neighoring town and attempts to live independently. The story is difficult to place in time, giving so few topical references that the casual mention of a microwave oven shocks the reader. In addition, the discrepency between the narrator's eloquent language and whitetrash characters like gum-cracking Wilma Jean is sometimes jarring. But Bauer has a superb ear for the language of men on a construction crew or drinkers in the local bar, and Ed and Ramona are unforgetable characters. --Sandra Lieb

Combine the characters of Raymond Carver with the sensibilities of Henry James and the result might be Bauer's bleak, but vividly written first novel. Ed and Ramona King live in Myles, a grim mill town in upstate New York. They have a baby named Jonas, but already the marriage has turned sour. During her pregnancy, Ramona, a wiry and rambunctious young woman, had tried to escape her claustrophobic existence, but a freak car accident severed her right hand. Now she has an artificial hand (which makes it difficult to care for the baby), a stultifying home and a distant and sullen husband. Early in the novel, while lying in the middle of a field on a hot summer day, Ramona wanders away from the baby. Before she knows it (it's as if she's in a trance) she's fleeing Myles and all it represents. On the road she meets a goodhearted man named Donnie, who lives in a trailer by the river. Ramona establishes with him the first genuine intimacy she's ever had. But fear of discovery causes her to move to a nearby town, where she finds a job and an apartment. Meanwhile, Ramona's aban don ment of him throws Ed King into a tragic tailspin. The book follows both their stories; as Ramona struggles to find her identity, Ed sinks into a lonely and embittered oblivion. This densely written novel occasionally employs language and metaphor that over whelm the characters and settings it depicts. Still, the first-time author writes with power and compassion. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Seldom do first novels combine emotional intensity with stylistic complexity, but Bauer does so here in an exceptionally well-written novel that boils with rage and simmers with despair. This bleak tale of domestic strife, set in a depressed upstate New York town, attends to its hapless characters with a sympathetic imagination, a literary sensibility that transforms inarticulate fury into lucid poetry. Myles, New York, ""deeply isolated in the hills by its moat of spilling poverty,"" is the type of small town that thrives on gossip; and the lives of Ed and Romona King provide much grist for the mill. Romona, who married while in her teens, and became a mother at 20, spent most of her life in ""dreamy withdrawal from the town's banalities."" But marriage to her high-school sweetheart, now a bitter and sarcastic laborer, proves stifling, and she soon considers herself a failure as wife and mother. Abandoning her one-year-old in a local field, Romona begins walking south, ""as though she wished to work toward an emptiness, to return to the blameless grace that dream awarded."" Without money, she relies on strangers, who are often moved by her artificial hand, the result of a car accident the last time she tried to leave town. Never wandering more than 50 or so miles from home, waifish and dreamy Romona finds each place much like the last--a never-ending network of greasy diners and sleazy bars. Meanwhile, Ed suspects that everyone in Myles considers him ""pitiable and pathetic,"" and he expresses his anger and frustration in increasingly troublesome ways. Before his wife left him, Ed drove around town with ""the mannered crawls of motor-screaming serenity,"" but now he roars through the streets with ear-piercing furor. He begins living behind his house in a lean-to made from old car doors. And none of his friends can pierce his ""impenetrable silence,"" which soon explodes into paranoid violence. While Romona's day of departure becomes the stuff of local lore, she continues to live prosaically not far away. About the same time she decides to return to her son, Jonas, Ed finally decides to go looking for her--an odyssey that ends with him drunk and asleep in a snow drift. Quite simply, a masterpiece of working-class fiction. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.