Salt Line

Arnie Carrington, an ex-professor, has bought up a considerable amount of land on the Mississippi coast. True, all the buildings and islands and beachfront there have been devastated by hurricane Camille - but Arnie cherishes all these holdings, clinging to them jealously until the perfect buyer comes along. He won't sell to Frank Matteo, a local Mafioso; he abhors the big motel chain that's interested; he might consider the government, but only if they agree to preserve the area as park land. Meanwhile, however, there are personal complications for Arnie - who was a charismatic figure on campus in the Sixties and even in decline (near-bankrupt, widowered, impotent, suffering from writer's block) still has presence. Among the various women who continue to find him irresistible: the wife and daughter of an old friend and rival, Lex Graham. But Graham has a powerful weapon in this jealousy-quartet - because he knows Arnie's deep secret: that Arnie mercy-killed his terminally ill Wife and buried her on the island he now so closely guards. Still, even with dark secrets and reverses and Mafia hardball, Arnie valiantly maintains his god-like hold over his own little bit of reality. As always, Spencer can be counted on for fine writing - sentences that please and sometimes even awe. ("His entry was low-key, but his presence, his alert carriage and finely determined movement made an accumulation of itself like the widening ripple behind a smooth, high-masted cabin schooner with its motor cut to the last notch, coming into view with no wish of any sort, and no beauty average enough to need thinking of, superb.") But the characters here are more interesting in outline than in substance; their scenes together are often lifeless, too well-balanced and formal. And though Spencer has a strong, promising theme in this ambitious novel - secrets deferred, dreams ascendant - the execution is detached and diffuse, without the sharpness of her best short stories. (Kirkus Reviews)