Picturing the Wreck - Hardcover

Dani Shapiro teaches creative writing at Columbia University and in the graduate program at New York University.

Shapiro, author of Fugitive Blue (1992), writes with great sensitivity about fractured familial relationships, but she skews her literary finesse with a peculiar heavy-handedness. In her third novel, she elevates improbability to mythic proportions as she executes a series of variations on the theme of wreckage. Thirty years ago, Solomon Grossman, an up-and-coming New York psychoanalyst and the only survivor of a Jewish German family that had perished in the Holocaust, wrecked his life with one outrageous act, a sexual liaison with a patient. When his revengeful seductress, the daughter of a Nazi official no less, went public, Solomon's life was destroyed and he lost all contact with his infant son, Daniel. Now 64 and still lonely, Solomon sees his son on television. There has been a terrible plane wreck, and Daniel is in charge of the investigation. Solomon rushes off to the scene of the crash, and in the midst of tragedy, he and his son meet as adults for the first and last time. Amazingly enough, Shapiro does transcend the schmaltziness of her plot to celebrate our ability to embrace even the most painful destiny with dignity. Donna Seaman