Publishers Weekly
Packard’s note to the reader at the end of the novel on the book’s typography serves to illuminate her attention to aesthetic detail throughout. The story reads like a prose poem—emotional significance comes across in the sparsely told daily machinations of the lives of a few intentionally but tenuously connected New Yorkers. Sarah is a lapsed minister, experiencing a mortal-world version of limbo. Adrift from her religion and her marriage, and increasingly irrelevant in her grown-up daughter’s life, she is aimlessly, persistently looking for something to hold onto. She clings to moments, recorded in joyful and precise detail, like a single meal at a dimly lit restaurant, or an encounter with a strange man. When she meets Abraham Darby, a gruff but sensuous artist, she willingly steps into his life, leaving hers behind for a night that turns into a weekend, and then merges into something more difficult to extricate herself from. Packard (Fall Asleep Forgetting) weaves a dreamy yet well-paced narrative with richly developed characters who gradually come to discover that life is always going on—whether they’re watching or not. (July)
Kirkus Reviews
Packard (Fall Asleep Forgetting, 2010) searches the shadowy landscape of love and family. Betrayed by her husband and best friend, the Rev. Sarah Obadias finds herself "this less-than-married minister." After a church conference brought on by a crisis in faith, Sarah's at loose ends in lower Manhattan. She retreats to a restaurant/bar, there meeting Abraham Darby, renowned painter, a virile, self-obsessed colossus. Sarah and Darby are marked with the "refinement of age." She's 69; he's slightly older, but their attraction is intense, immediate. Cocktails, food and then bed follow. The next morning, she finds herself with Darby in Brooklyn at the funeral of Yago Darby Díaz, Darby's son, dead of AIDS. Sarah's shocked when Darby stands to eulogize his son and rages that "[h]e stopped sharing his life with me when he joined this...culture?" Lives quickly become intertwined, Sarah with Darby, the two then with Johnny, Yago's spouse, and their son, Angelo, and Allyssa, Angelo's biological mother. Johnny is settled, owner of a small restaurant, and Yago, blithe spirit in life and death, had partied regularly around the bar circuit. The narrative moves to Darby's summer house at Orient, Long Island, where Alejandra, Yago's sensual and flamboyant artist mother, joins the moveable wake, and then back to the city, where Darby tumbles into a deep depression. Faith broken by doubt, Sarah's left to confront her fractured life alone. Packard's book layers symbolism on its pages, but it's also an entrancing exercise in employing language to explore and define the nature of love and the meaning of life framed against death. The lyrical narrative edges toward the surreal when Yago speaks from the hospital gurney where he lies dead, then addresses Darby in the car on the way to his beach house, and finally approaches Sarah on the beach. However, beginning to end, the novel is a deeply poetic meditation "About life, about trust. About God. About death." Brilliantly imagined and rendered.
