Curves of Pursuit — Thomas Farber

In his first novel, Thomas Farber gives us an unusually honest look inside the heart of a man trying to understand the curves of pursuit in his own life. His ties, for example, to his older brother: as boys and on into adulthood, the two communicate best with a football, sending each other out for passes, cheering each other on with their private polylingual wordplay. The pattern that exists with the parents is another, a curve of pursuit marked always by the imminence and the memory of death. And so too with his marriage, where all that is between him and his wife is richly verbal, intricate, and in real jeopardy, and where their cats are the witnesses to the intensity of what binds them. Despite the narrator's feeling of loss, and despite his remorse, we begin to see with them perhaps certain connections which simply cannot be severed. That whatever else is also true, the bonds of love may persist.