Newspaper Article

An aimless odyssey redeemed by vision

Reviewed by Meg Wolitzer, an author whose novel "This is Your Life" was published last fall

1989

Overview

Like the life of its protagonist, this first novel consists of a series of dreamy, casually linked fragments sometimes reminiscent of a long, disjointed psychoanalytic session. Memories give way to other memories, and what story there is unfolds in a decidedly nonlinear fashion. \"Intimacy\" does have a plot of sorts, but what propels the narrative is not so much what happens as how Cecilia Cronstein, the narrator, responds to what happens. She is a woman who is both careless and deeply passionate, casualty and survivor. The narrator compares herself with J. D. Salinger's Seymour Glass, who commits suicide in the story \"A Perfect Day for Bananafish,\" but in fact Susan Chace's Cecilia is more like one of Joan Didion's characters: affectless, damaged and lyrical, and somehow trapped in an arid Western setting.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC