School for the blind

the long version

Dennis McFarland's best-selling novel The Music Room was one of the most exciting literary debuts of 1990. Eagerly awaited, McFarland's second novel confirms this generously gifted writer's place among the best novelists of his generation. School for the Blind is the story of a brother and sister, now in their seventies, propelled on an unforeseen journey into their pasts by a shocking event in the present. Francis Brimin, a celebrated news photographer, has spent his perapatetic life as a professional voyeur, peering out with his camera at the lives of others but avoiding any gaze inward. Now retired, he returns to his childhood home on the Gulf Coast of Florida and reacquaints himself with his sweet-tempered older sister, Muriel, whose circumscribed life has been the opposite of his own. But both brother and sister are haunted by images from the past, and when Francis stumbles upon evidence of a gruesome local murder, it shakes them profoundly. Gripped by a "creeping vine of memory," they gradually confront their blindness to the hidden truths about their lives.