A Circle Around Her

Jonathan Strong's A CIRCLE AROUND HER is deceptively simple: a novel organized around a divorced middle-aged woman, Mary Lanaghan; her four children; her ex-husband and possible lovers; her friends; her neighbors in a Massachusetts community that is far from Boston ... almost. But beneath this transparent surface is a profound sense of time passing that recalls the worlds of Dorothea Brooke in MIDDLEMARCH and of Clarissa Dalloway. Whether it is the very fat neighbors, or the two gay men who run the local diner and the many locals who frequent it, or the marvelously individualized Lanaghan children, this novel offers some of the most generously rendered characters in contemporary fiction. They stand before us, warts and all, gloriously human and slyly beyond our typing of them, in a novel that begins on a Monday in May and ends on a Sunday in November, and always refuses the easily novelistic. This sense of time passing, in human life and in our daily history, provides much of the psychological layering that makes the characters so richly there and elusive, in a novel of rich compassion and sly humor and luminous prose. Strong has written other fine novels (AN UNTOLD TALE especially). A CIRCLE AROUND HER is something more, a picture of a woman and those around her in a "world [with] possibilities for beauty ... and nearly as many for disappointment."