Re: Reaching Heaven

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@hotpop.com)
Wed, 08 Sep 1999 12:29:07 +1000 

Will, I erroneously threw the newspaper away (my mother's an overzealous
recycler) and I'm madly trying to locate the review somewhere in
cyberspace. I found it, but there's something ticky going on with the
server so I couldn't actually read it. I do know that the title is actually
`Almost Heaven' and the author is Marianne Wiggins. An Amazon search
yielded various reviews from several newspapers, most of which make
reference to the Holden Caulfield reference, find it at:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0517707624/qid=936757547/sr=1-3/002-3
996183-2797465.

I'm sure Amazon won't mind if I just quote one in this email:

`Amazon.com 
                     It seems no accident that the narrator of Marianne
Wiggins's sixth novel,
                     Almost Heaven, is named Holden. Like his literary
predecessor in J.D.
                     Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, this edgy
twentysomething war
                     correspondent is also a protector of lost innocence,
or at least a seeker of
                     grace in a world gone brutal. Done in and emotionally
damaged by a stint
                     in Bosnia, Holden escapes back to the U.S. at a time
when a rage of bad
                     weather--tornadoes, heat waves, hurricanes--grips the
nation and
                     portends his immersion in a relationship of cyclonic
intensity.

                     Once stateside, he entwines his fate with that of
someone who is suffering
                     from traumatic amnesia in response to the sudden loss
of her entire family.
                     For Melanie, Holden quickly becomes a life raft in a
sea of random and
                     unfathomable acts, and the two take off across the
country in an attempt
                     to escape the gathering storms, both real and
metaphorical, that surround
                     them. As Holden puts it: "One way or another someday,
if not already, all
                     of us will have left some one some where some dream
some loneliness
                     some thing."

                     Almost Heaven is an eclectic work, weaving together
streams of desire,
                     lost dreams, and sharp-edged commentary on America in
its millennial
                     madness into a haunting story of two people who
succumb to erotic
                     frenzy, both losing and finding themselves in each
other. Wiggins, the
                     prize-winning author of John Dollar, has produced a
raw, kinetic book
                     that explores the question of what it is like to run
so hard from memory
                     that it's as though your life never happened, as
though you had just been
                     born. --Marianne Painter '

Salinger or no Salinger it does sound like quite an interesting book. I'll
keep an eye out for it.

Will wrote:
> C, where is the review?  I'm curious to know more about _Reaching
Heaven_.
> Do you know who the uathor is? will

Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com