THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701100661
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JULIE HALE
LENGTH: 65 lines
NEW YEAR'S EVE
LISA GRUNWALD
Crown. 366 pp. $24.
Lisa Grunwald is a contributing editor at Life magazine who was accused of working in cahoots with her sister, Clinton aide Mandy Grunwald, to author the ``Anonymous'' political smash-hit Primary Colors. Getting press over a book for which one isn't responsible could be a nightmare to a writer with a pair of novels of her own. It's definitely the wrong way to forge a literary career.
But Grunwald may well remain more notable for the best seller she didn't write than for her latest work. New Year's Eve doesn't resonate. It's a novel that goes down easy, and is forgotten quickly - unlike the tenacious Primary Colors.
Set in New York, Grunwald's book is a contemporary story about twin sisters coping with the past and their own competitive relationship. Heather and Erica are in their mid-30s, both married, both mothers with successful careers. Heather is a doctor, Erica a classics professor whose specialty is mythology. For Erica, the story's narrator, the past itself is mythical and exalted, a landscape of treasured memories to be returned to again and again.
Through Erica's flashbacks to New Year's Eves of the past - ``the night on which we gathered, no matter where else we might have been tempted to go, to discover anew both how safe and how costly it was to be together'' - the reader gets a glimpse of the twins' rivalrous but happy childhood, before the death of their mother and the depression their father feels over growing old. With time and age, the flashbacks reveal, the sisters have become distant. It takes mutual pregnancies to renew their bond.
``We were pregnant together on New Year's Eve: my sister and I, twins in our 30s, brown-haired, mammoth, rivals in waiting,'' Erica says, as the story opens on the tail-end of 1985. Her daughter, Sarah, and Heather's son, David, are born six weeks apart, and the children grow to develop a friendship reminiscent of their mothers'.
The story takes on a deeper, more complex dimension when David is killed in a car accident at the age of four, leaving behind a family marred by grief. What ensues from this point on is a suspenseful and dramatic account of how children and parents cope with loss. In an eerie twist of plot, Sarah believes she can communicate with David in heaven, a fantasy that Heather, in her grief, dangerously encourages. A tug-of-war of sorts ensues between the sisters, as Erica struggles to win Sarah back from the mythical world she and Heather have constructed. It is a fight to put the past where it belongs: in the past.
As New Year's Eve demonstrates, it is not an easy battle. Literally and metaphorically, Grunwald shows how the past can haunt us, the way it wields a singular power over the present, a power from which only the future can - perhaps - provide release. Her insights into the complexity of relationships, and the mentality of children are impressive.
Though her dialogue is sharp and snappy, it sometimes fails to do justice to the gravity of the narrative - a shame, because about 75 percent of this novel is dialogue. The book has a spliced, dicey structure that is apropos for a narrator blinded by the flashbulb of nostalgia, who presents the past as she perceives it - in a series of quick cuts and images. But density is sacrificed, as a result, and, ultimately, the story feels weightless.
Despite the ghostly pyrotechnics, Lisa Grunwald's latest novel is a surface read, a fast fling. For readers seeking density and resonance, New Year's Eve will hardly be a reason to celebrate. MEMO: Julie Hale is a writer who lives in Norfolk.