In Clara's Hands

Financial Times

Olshans seventh novel … ticks faster than a stopwatch. Humor, feeling, perfect pitch. Olshan has it all.

Gay Times

An intriguing, moving story of love, death and madness.

Marie Claire

Intense and gripping.

Time Out

Engrossing.

Times

Olshan holds together this tale of a family seeking comfort in difficult times with wit and empathy.

Publishers Weekly

Olshan brings back the warm and waggish Jamaican housekeeper of his successful 1985 debut, Clara's Heart, but fans of that novel (or of Whoopi Goldberg's movie version) may be disappointed by how little page time she receives here. The novel centers on Will Kaplan (the hero of Olshan's Nightswimmer), who was raised by housekeeper Clara in a New York City suburb in the 1970s and is now a cartographer living in Burlington, Vt. He has befriended neighbor Marie Claire Arcenaux, the mother of his former lover Peter. The novel opens with Will learning that a jet has just crashed off of Long Island. Marie was scheduled for that flight, and Will assumes that she is dead. He soon learns that she was not on the plane, but the fact still remains that no one has seen or heard from her in days. Trying to unravel the mystery, Will calls Peter, who's in California supporting his sister, Grace as she undergoes treatment for Hodgkins disease. Will also asks Clara to come up to Burlington to help him find Marie. The woman's disappearance recalls for Will the trauma of his older brother's fatal skiing accident 20 years earlier, and also makes him realize how much he regrets breaking up with Peter. Olshan moves back and forth between Will, Peter, Clara and Marie's point of view. He probes their relationships sensitively, though the abundance of deaths, heartache and dramatic revelations sometimes has a made-for-TV feel. The witty, unpredictable Clara lights up the page; her ebullience is a welcome contrast to her fellow characters, who are uniformly paralyzed by the past. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Grim but tepid psychological thriller pieces together the enigma of a woman’s disappearance. Will Kaplan (from Nightswimmer, 1994) has a weird talent for escaping tragedy. Previously, he and his boyfriend went for a long swim and the boyfriend never came back; here, Will misses a flight that crashes into the ocean off Long Island with his friend Marie aboard. You can’t really call it luck, and it’s too much for Will, who retreats into a grief-stricken depression after the catastrophe and has to be nursed back to normal by his old Jamaican nanny Clara, who travels from Brooklyn all the way up to Burlington, Vermont (where Will works as a cartographer). Having arranged Marie’s trip in the first place, Will feels responsible for her death, but his guilt turns to confusion when the airline claims that Marie was not aboard. Where is she? Reluctantly, Will contacts her son Peter (with whom he had an unhappy affair some years before), who has no idea where his mother is. From Peter, though, Will does learn that Marie’s daughter Grace has been diagnosed with cancer, and in turn Grace tells him that Marie had considered canceling her trip to come and stay with her during her treatments. Clara even consults a seer in Jamaica to learn what became of Marie, but to no avail. Olshan, author of seven previous novels, tells his story from different points of view, and from Marie’s chapters we begin to see the outlines of an answer to the mystery. We also learn of the private demons from her past that drove Marie part of the way to her end. Soap opera: caricatures (the faithful nanny, haunted mother, jilted lover obsessed with his boyfriend) in a tale that tries to make up for its shallowness withimprobable twists of fate and endless (equally improbable) revelations from the lurid past.