Books in Brief: A Winter’s Reckoning

A Winter’s Reckoning, by Ellen Bromfield Geld (Doubleday, 279 pp., $7.95). Out of five characters—father, mother, son, daughter, and faithful nanny—Ellen Bromfield Geld has constructed another of her astonishingly vivid, beautifully crafted novels. It is an interplay of strong and weak personalities: Lorenzo, the flamboyant, multi-talented architect; Marion, the gently-bred, childlike wife who plays moth to his flame; Melissa, bright, talented but not strong enough to withstand the evil that slowly envelops them all; Jaime, the introverted, clumsy boy who spends his childhood trying not to catch his father’s eye, and who retires to the cluttered asylum of his room, there to fantasize his very real apprehension of the sickness around him; and the very British nanny, as strong and domineering as Lorenzo, who makes possible the world Lorenzo has built, first in London and then on a wild and remote farm on the rugged coast of Maine. These are the players. It is only when Melissa has removed herself from the others, after a traumatic act of cowardice and Nanny’s death, and spent a winter half a continent away in the cold clear air of the Tetons that she comes to understand what destroyed the House of Lorenzo. There she examines the intricate tapestry of their lives until the picture that had been so obscured by the distorted lens of Jaime’s imagination is clearly revealed—and Melissa has made good her escape, as Jaime in his in articulated love had hoped she would. Readers of Mrs. Geld’s earlier novels (A Timeless Place, The Dreamers, The Garlic Tree) are a spoiled lot. They have come to expect a cracking good tale from her. In A Winter’s Reckoning they get that plus a heightened sensitivity through her handling of the complicated personalities her talent has given life to.

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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A Winter’s Reckoning, by Ellen Bromfield Geld (Doubleday, 279 pp., $7.95). Out of five characters—father, mother, son, daughter, and faithful nanny—Ellen Bromfield Geld has constructed another of her astonishingly vivid, beautifully crafted novels. It is an interplay of strong and weak personalities: Lorenzo, the flamboyant, multi-talented architect; Marion, the gently-bred, childlike wife who plays moth to his flame; Melissa, bright, talented but not strong enough to withstand the evil that slowly envelops them all; Jaime, the introverted, clumsy boy who spends his childhood trying not to catch his father’s eye, and who retires to the cluttered asylum of his room, there to fantasize his very real apprehension of the sickness around him; and the very British nanny, as strong and domineering as Lorenzo, who makes possible the world Lorenzo has built, first in London and then on a wild and remote farm on the rugged coast of Maine. These are the players. It is only when Melissa has removed herself from the others, after a traumatic act of cowardice and Nanny’s death, and spent a winter half a continent away in the cold clear air of the Tetons that she comes to understand what destroyed the House of Lorenzo. There she examines the intricate tapestry of their lives until the picture that had been so obscured by the distorted lens of Jaime’s imagination is clearly revealed—and Melissa has made good her escape, as Jaime in his in articulated love had hoped she would. Readers of Mrs. Geld’s earlier novels (A Timeless Place, The Dreamers, The Garlic Tree) are a spoiled lot. They have come to expect a cracking good tale from her. In A Winter’s Reckoning they get that plus a heightened sensitivity through her handling of the complicated personalities her talent has given life to.