A Four-Sided Bed

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Stylein this case, lyrical and confessional plays as much a role as characterization does in Searle's intense, deeply moving first novel (which follows My Body to You, a story collection that won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize). In October 1984, while at college in Ohio, sociology student Allie Hart meets library worker JJ Wolfe, who graduated the previous year. Soon after they become lovers, JJ tells Allie that, four years earlier, he was "certified schizo" and received treatment at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. What Allie worries about most, however, is the gender of Bird and Kin, JJ's two intimate, mysterious friends from Mass. Mental whom she's never met, and the sexual nature of their three-way relationship. Even after Allie and JJ marry and move to New Haven, where Allie works as a special-ed substitute teacher while JJ studies computer science at Yale, their marriage is undermined by JJ's continued secretiveness about his past. Allie suspects that JJ was once bisexual and may now be HIV positive. When the emotionally damaged Bird, after an eight-year silence, begins writing JJ, Allie intercepts the letters. Deception, lies, fears, pregnancy and AIDS complicate this unusually intelligent exploration of sexuality. The point of view alternates between that of Allie and that of Bird, whose letters to JJ recount Bird and Kin's travels around the world. What the novel lacks in plot, it makes up for with a compelling stop-and-start rhythm to its psychological revelations. Searle gives us a moodily erotic portrayal of emotionally confused, scared young characters searching for love and their true selves. (Feb.)

Library Journal

In Searle's debut novel (My Body to You, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize in 1993), love is more than a mode of physical expression. The characters: J.J. and Bird, a young man and woman who meet in a mental hospital; Kin, a gay man and Bird's longtime friend, who rescues them from their illnesses through kindness, love, and three-way sex; and Alice Ann, J.J.'s pregnant wife of four years, who doesn't like the scenario she sees unfolding when J.J. receives a braid of his hair, cut in the hospital, along with an invitation to the wedding of Kin and Bird. There are passages of surreal beauty and genuine emotion in the letters Bird sends J.J. while on her honeymoon with a sick Kin, both wishing for J.J.'s presence, and all the characters are fully realized. This book is excellent at what it intends to do. That, however, may not be for all libraries.Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, N.Y.

Boston Phoenix

Searle stretches the angles of friendship, the lines of love, and the curves of lust....Her elegant prose and anything-but-PC gender play are pleasing to the mind and to the loins. -- Boston Phoenix

Booklist Booklist

“Bending gender and conventional notions about love and marriage, Searle’s bold, beautiful book reaches right past the sensationalism of a love triangle to offer us and intense and moving portrait of the different ways people can connect…”

Kirkus Reviews

“A powerful unsettling first novel…what makes Searle’s work stand out is her relentless scrutiny of even the smallest events and gestures, the way in which she believably locates…the specifics of character…A bright, distinctive, haunting debut…”

Library Journal

“There are passages of surreal beauty and genuine emotion…”

New York Times

“In clipped, poetic language, Searle skillfully unwinds a psychosexual narrative about the power of unresolved longing and the damage the past can do to the present…”

Seattle Times

“Searle's prose is lyrical; even the rhythm of her sentences captures the hesitation and isolating loneliness of her characters. She infuses the novel with a tangible sadness and longing, a longing within each of her characters for a fuller life, a life that comes without the necessity of reinvention…the book provides a moving meditation on love and loyalty…”