Vigil for a Stranger: A Novel - Softcover

Kitty Burns Florey is the author of ten novels and two works of nonfiction as well as many essays and short stories. Born in Syracuse, she has lived in Boston, Brooklyn, and New Haven. She now lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Florey, sets this, her sixth novel, inside the mind of Christine Ward, a contemporary painter who lives with an eccentric pizza-maker named James in New Haven, Conn. Christine, finally living a calm, happy, albeit superficial, life after years of mental instability, travels to Manhattan one day to have lunch with her French ex-mother-in-law and to meet a gallery owner. The day changes her life: snooping in a fellow train traveler's Filofax, she sees the very uncommon name of her dead best friend, a hipped-out, left-wing charmer she knew at Oberlin. She begins an odyssey to discover if he is in fact dead, a search that quickly becomes an exploration of her sanity, and the depths of her unhappiness. Florey writes with straightforward simplicity, and readers will quickly find themselves not only laughing with Christine at her own absurdity, but feeling her bleak, chronic pain. Soon obsessed with not only her friend's death, but her brother's, she succumbs to the instability that deprived her of her only child. Through almost the entire book, Florey manages to balance the ambiguity of events with Christine's clarity in the face of them. If the rather tentative ending falters, it still does not lessen Florey's achievement.
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