Invisible mending

the long version

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.