Available Light Author:Ellen Currie When Kitty O'Carolan wakes up one morning to find her lover, Jack Rambeau, gone, she is terribly surprised to discover she misses him terribly. And Rambeau, the saxonphone player and gambler (if a man who never, ever wins can truly be said to be gambling), longs for Kitty as lustily as she yearns for him. The stories of these bedazzled lovers-a... more »nd the stories they tell each other-form the heart of Available Light, Ellen Currie's extraordinary first novel.
While Kitty and Rambeau conduct their passionate separation, Kitty's sister, Eileen (the living vigil light), and her physician husband, Gordon, continue their grim pursuit of fecundity into the regions beyond the ken of medical science. Characters flash into life in a phrase: Kitty's razor-tongued Irish mother, Mick, "Our Lady of the Perpetual Cardigan"; Kitty's suitor, Mr. Conrad, a poetry workshop groupie in the throes of The Mango Cycle; the bawdy Dorinda, everybody's sex object, pregnant with a baby everybody claims; and then, of course, there's Rambeau's mysterious little dog, all too willing to bite the hand that feeds it. Above all there is Kitty, as memorable a woman-lover, sister, daughter-as you are likely to meet.
Available Light marks Ellen Currie's debut as a major new voice in American fiction. Filled with pain and laughter and the juice of life, it is a literary experience of the first rank.« less