Hind's Kidnap

A very tall man resumes his search for a kidnaped child long after the unsolved case has been officially closed. Hind dropped his search when he married. Now, years later, at the instant the novel opens, he is leaving his apartment to visit his estranged wife Sylvia and his 5-year-old daughter May. But at his door is a strange old woman and in his mailbox a note beckoning him toward the old trail. Hind's renewed quest leads him among people in their spring and early-summer landscape - a city pier; the well-fenced office complex of a famous firm; a New England golf course and the owner's house overlooking it; a city health club; and a city university. Yet at the end of this pentad the kidnaping of the child, Hershey Laurel, has receded to a dim corner of the book. And Hind's late, beloved guardian, and the threatening past he summons up, grow more and more powerful, uncontrollably, as does Hind's awareness that his search has taken possession of him. Hind realizes, too, that despite his craving to be needed, he has used people as means, abbreviated them as clues, and disposed them in his heart as exhibits. He becomes unsure whether he wants to go back to Sylvia because the fifth clue points to her or because she is a woman he loves. He revisits his friends, his clues, in the hope of "taking" them not as clues but as ends in themselves. Indeed, he endeavors to de-kidnap them. But what has been started - and only partly by Hind - can't be stopped. The lock pursues the keys, the kidnaping pursues the memory that is trying to erase it, and a mass of old life emerges - passionate adolescence, the cruel charm of the clever, sickly girl Hind adored, the intricate commitments to childhood friends, and, in back of it all, the guardian himself, a failure, a remotely tragic hero, an interesting man. The maze of the book's opening part has come into focus out of its dense nightmare anonymity: New York, Brooklyn Heights, terrible genealogy, the self in relation to others.


Genre: Literary Fiction