Hind's Kidnap

A long-ago kidnapping case, all but abandoned, resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighbourhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, and a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man's obsession revisits people as clues while at the centre, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife's voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them.

All these unfolding circles of understanding are in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, and even a solvent at times, simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half-century later, we may experience in Hind's Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnapped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.