Invisible Mending: A Novel - Tapa blanda

Zimmer's wife, Lil, says their love is dead. He says it's just tired. Divorcing, he feels as if his whole love life is passing before him - and then part of it really is, in the still-sexy person of old flame Rhona Glinsky. In artfully crafted interlocking flashbacks set against a vividly drawn scrim of New York City, Busch lets his hapless hero tell his story of the angst-driven complications of both licit and illicit love. It was Greenwich Village in the Sixties, and Zimmer was writing copy for a sleazy PR agency. Rhona was a voluptuous Nazi-hunting librarian who taught him introductory love and guilt and drove him into the arms of the tall blonde shiksa Lillian. And now, twenty years later, the middle-aged Zimmer is proving that opposites still attract, by falling in love - again - with both of them. Invisible Mending is Frederick Busch's half-comic, half-serious mediation on Jewish identity and consciousness - an ambitious grapple with the New York/Jewish ethos.

FREDERICK BUSCH is Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University, where he teaches fiction and creative writing and conducts the Living Writers course. In 1991 he received the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. A well-known critic and reviewer, he is the author of twenty books, eighteen of them fictionmost recently a novel, "Girls," published by Harmony Books. He has been acting director of the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa and has held Woodrow Wilson, National Endowment for the Arts, James Merrill, and Guggenheim Fellowships. He lives with his wife, Judy, in Sherburne, New York, in a rambling nineteenth-century farmhouse. The Busches have two grown sons."