The Secret Spring of Edith Cooley

Imagine both a whimsical and serious reply to Camus's MYTH OF SISYPHUS, which questions--without props, tricks-of-eye, or preconceptions--the fundamental meaning of life itself, and we can begin to anticipate some of the irony and candor in store for us in this deeply revealing novel,THE SECRET SPRING OF EDITH COOLEY, inspired by an unexplained vanishing of a lonely scholar in Greenwich Village who left behind a provocative and soul-searching journal. The curtain opens in the spring of 1990, in an old Dutch brownstone at the wane of the old millennium and dawning of the new, a time both rich and stagnant with the full bloom of modern meaninglessness. Edith Cooley, a once-beautiful aging Eastern Philosophies scholar, sets a stage one spring for a mysterious chain of events in which she seems to purposely involve our narrator, Natalie Tanner,an art student at the time. Shy, young, recently orphaned, given to bouts of daydreaming, but with an openness peculiarly remindful of Dostoevsky's IDIOT, Tanner sets a provocative mood of her own with her opening line: "I watched Edith come and go that spring I moved across the hall from her. That was an important part of it. She came and went, and her final going still haunts me..." There are other lures, among them an elusive twist in Edith's smile, tinged with "a form of melancholy, perhaps, but medieval in mood, or flat rather than visibly pained..."; or Tanner's first stolen glimpse of Edith's apartment, filled with books and paintings and billowing curtains, yet permeated with a smell of mustiness so strong it pervades Tanner's entire day; while in class that morning she imagines they've already shared some rare dialogue, "not unlike one of those cryptic passages between Dante and his poet-guide on their journey through hell..." Equally provocative are two pivotal male characters: Jake Laslo, a gifted and misanthropic artist who wears the same "soiled jacket" every day and for whom Tanner feels an inexplicable responsibility, and "King", a still-handsome middle-aged jazz composer whose curious involvement with Edith provides not only an important turn of events for Tanner but a dark and final dimension to the novel's outcome.