Writing about grief has been the death of many a novelist--artistically speaking, that is. Even the most earnest attempts to describe this taxing and tenacious emotion can dip into bathos and rhetorical wire-pulling. In Layover, however, Lisa Zeidner gives grief its due, and does so with such wit and high style that the reader's (occasional) tears are mixed with a kind of elation. Exactly what is Claire Newbold mourning? Mostly the death of her young son, which has taken place some time before the novel opens. In response, she's withdrawn from her husband (a no-less-shattered surgeon) and her job (a sales rep for a medical-supplies company), allowing herself just the faintest purchase on her old existence: "Right now, I realize, I was just floating. Trying to float. Skimming over my life, letting life tickle my feet. I had no plans to glide off entirely." Gliding off entirely, however, is exactly what she does after learning of a single infidelity on her husband's part. In the...
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