Shorter notices Robb Forman Dew Fortunate Lives. Morrow, 285 pages, $20
Robb Forman Dew is a slow worker. Dale Loves Sophie to Death, her widely praised first novel, was published in 1981; Fortunate Lives, her third novel, has just appeared. Dew’s output may be small, but it is of high quality, and Fortunate Lives, like its predecessors, is absolutely first-rate.
Fortunate Lives is about the Howells family, first seen in Dale Loves Sophie to Death. Much has happened in the troubled decade that separates the two books. Martin Howells, professor at a small New England college and editor of a little magazine, and Dinah, his slightly obsessive homecoming-queen wife, are still trying to come to terms with the senseless death of Toby, their second child, who was killed six years ago in an automobile accident; David, Toby’s older brother, is about to go off to Harvard, and Fortunate Lives is the story of, among other things, his last summer at home. Despite its academic setting and wry touches of attendant sexual melodrama, Fortunate Livesis in no way an “academic novel,” just as its author is no satirist. Nor has Dew’s impeccable Southern-writer pedigree (she is John Crowe Ransom’s granddaughter and Robert Penn Warren’s goddaughter) given her any noticeable inclination toward the gothic or the grotesque. She prefers to plumb the emotional intricacies of everyday family life, and beneath the surface irony of her title lies the passionately held conviction that domestic love