LIVING DEAD GIRL

Goldberg rises above the sleazy glamour of his well-received debut (Fake Liar Cheat, 2000) and takes a far deeper cut into his material.

In Los Angeles, anthropologist Paul Luden gets a call from Bruce Duper, his neighbor on Granite Lake in upcoast Washington. Paul’s separated wife Molly has disappeared from their lonesome cabin. Their boat is docked, the cabin’s front door locked. Where’s Molly? Now in his mid-30s, Paul drives up with his new love, Ginny, 19, his navel-ringed student, whose insecure, demanding dialogue Goldberg captures dead-on. We hear about Paul’s parents and his pathetic losses with Molly. Paul and Molly, it seems, should never have married, both being manic-depressive (details about their illness are doled out slowly), but at least Molly’s body knows more than they do: it aborts one fetus, has another rupture her fallopian tube, and finally creates a monster with the one child she does bear, Katrina, a beautiful little dying girl with brain and body tumors which in themselves harbor. . . . Since childhood, Paul’s illness has had him drawing inner organs and bones of pigs and other animals—now he’s a bone-smart anthropologist. A large part of the story’s charms are Paul’s very, very big thoughts about the descent of man from a single cell—the mind of an anthropologist viewing his family’s wink of existence. When Katrina dies, Paul madly draws her inner organs, tumors (and what’s inside them), while under the delusion that he can plant her cells in the earth or lake and have them regrow. But now where’s Molly gone? His dead smolder inside him, flare up and sear—and is Molly or Katrina the title character?

As in the film A Beautiful Mind, our deepening awareness of the hero’s madness is the main plot. But Paul is not Russell Crowe, and our ties with him weaken the more we learn. Still, strong stuff as the world wavers.