Looking for Heroes

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Something's not quite right in Emma and Gerald's four-bedroom house on Hawthorne Drive in suburban Long Island. Emma Mallick has recently lost her job at a NYC social service agency and finds herself longing for the undomesticated landscape of her childhood summers in Maine, a place where people think of thunderstorms as dazzling spectacles and do not hide from them as she and her neighbors do. Emma's husband Gerald Strauss finds no satisfaction in his thriving radiology practice-indeed, begins to view it as he might any crass means of turning a profit. And Aaron, their 18-year-old son, is not following what one of Gerald's medical partners calls "the approved and prescribed path to adulthood." He and his boyfriend Fernando, a model, are not entering college in the fall.

More than ever, both Emma and Gerald's fathers loom large. Taking over the estate of her father, the painter David Mallick, Emma is forced to reconsider their relationship more deeply than she's prepared to. At the same time, Gerald and Emma grapple with what to do about Sid, Gerald's willful father, a quickly declining old man who refuses to think about his future realistically-or at all.

Husband and wife, but Gerald in particular, each find themselves needing a role model to lead the way-an archetypal figure most of their contemporaries would find an earnest and full-grown hero capable of integrating boldness with decency and altruism with self-fulfillment.

Looking for Heroes shows that no true inner longing can be shared, that the yearning that precedes transformation can estrange us from our families while bringing us closer to our ideals. It is a novel that forgives its characters' frailties, if not their fears, clearing the way for some form of grace.