Love invents us

Elizabeth Taube is shy, chubby, unmoored, with parents as remote as planets, and she takes love where she finds it: at the candy counter in Frank's Five and Dime; in the dusty treasures revealed to her by Mrs. Hill, the elderly black woman she cares for and steals from; in the mirror at Furs by Klein. Elizabeth finds love in Mrs. Hill's cluttered little house and she finds it in the gaze of Max Stone, age forty-nine, teacher of English, father of three, and she takes it there, too, watching for clues to who she might be, trying on selves for his admiring eyes. And then, as she watches her high school basketball team practice one day, love takes her completely in the person of Huddie Lester, who "soaked and shone like rain on a moonlit night." Huddie and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Huddie. Their great, urgent love takes them both, into each other and into Huddie's narrow bed. Love takes Elizabeth, Huddie and other characters in this rich novel into unimagined places and unknown parts of themselves. It doesn't heal them or save them or hand them a happy ending, but it takes them to harbor, and points the way home.