What Happened to Henry

Rating:
Summary: The Care and Maintenance of Spirits After a War
Review: Sharon Pywell has accomplished the impossible; she has written a book about transcendence that is poignant and often hilarious, open to all wounds yet filled with hope. She erects finite boundaries in order to trample them: images from Japan seep into a New York household, past oozes into present, death into life, insanity into revelation, infidelity into pure devotion. She rejects easy answers in favor of paradox, synthesis and higher truth.

Pywell's main character often feels the pull of opposite impulses, such as her bitter rivalry with one brother, her blind love for the other. Pywell has done a masterful job at describing the attraction of metaphysical questions, combined with doubt about the answers. I am so grateful for Pywell's humorous portrayal of young Lauren Cooper puzzling over the edicts of her catechism teacher, Sister Leonarda.

Pywell's prose is fresh and vivid as the latest gossip, so steeped in ambiguous detail that it could be poetry, albeit very fun and readable poetry. Her characters are so true and so vulnerable that you wish you could hug them; they tug at your feelings like old songs. Women hide behind crusty attitudes, plays for attention and acts of service; men find safety behind slide rules, testosterone and care-giving, and yet all seek redemption through love.

Indeed, this is one of the most searching explorations of the nature and power of love that I have ever read. _What happened to Henry?_ is a must-read for anyone who suspects that love and salvation are related, as well as for anyone who longs for a new voice on the literary scene.