A Hole in the Universe

I have read all of Mary MaGarry Morris' books. She is one of the finest writers that I have ever read. Vanished and Hole in the Universe are two of my favorite of her books. Her characters are real and empathetic, her stories captivating. I can't wait until she publishes another treasure for us to read.

I've read many reviews of books with the testimony "I couldn't put it down'" but had never really felt that way about a book. To me that was one of the beautiful things about a book, I could always put it down and do something else and come back to it when it suited me. Last night I stayed up way past my bedtime to finish the last 100 pages of A Hole in the Universe. I so needed to know what was going to happen to Gordon, Jada and Delores the three main characters in the novel. Mary McGarry Morris makes these characters part of your life and you care deeply for them and hope beyond hope that their lives will get better. Needless to say I loved this book!

I LOVE Mary McGarry Morris so what you'll read here is 100% biased. Having devoured A Dangerous Woman and Vanished before realizing Ms. McHarry Morris is not exactly prolific, I promised to buy my own copy of her subsequent books and refrain from lending them to others if she'd just "step on it" a bit more. Fell on deaf ears, though ... .Alas, what attracts me to her books are the characters and the prose. Her characters are somewhere between mainstream akimbo and slipstream irregular; fringe-dwellers who we're all capable of employing at one time or another. Her dialogue flows easily and every so often hesitates momentarily for honest and revealing introspection.My offer still stands, Ms. McGarry Morris: Hardcover purchase, no lending. Now, get going on the next book!

Mary McGarry Morris dazzled us with her hard-hitting Songs in Ordinary Time and Fiona Range, and now she dishes up another feast for the reader. In A Hole in the Universe, she delivers an uncompromising and forceful story, full of wonderfully challenging characters, and remarkably interesting and heart rendering situations. The narrative centers on the character of Gordon Loomis who has just spent twenty-five years in prison for murder. He returns to his neighborhood as a changed man, but he also sees a neighborhood that has suffered the effects of urban blight where drug dealers now proliferate and property remains uncared for. With the help of his brother, Dennis, a successful oral surgeon, Gordon tries to desperately remake himself in a community that fears him and sees him as a criminal. Gordon's neighborhood is rundown but vitality was everywhere - women are on their front steps day or night, children play on the sidewalks, and music blasts from idle cars. Life might be a struggle, "but energy charges the air, blind and unstoppable." Yet Gordon finds a world gone awry, the planet tipped. "Instead of meteors, airplane bolts, and metal chunks fall from the sky." Gordon hates talking about himself: the misery of it, the emptiness, the dead echo behind every word like footsteps through an endless tunnel. Twenty-five years earlier, evil had invaded his aimless, blundering life, and he doesn't know how he can live with the consequences of what he has done.The strength of this novel is the wonderfully three-dimensional characters. Feaster and Polie, the two local drug dealers, who recruit the young Jada - who hungers for love just as she hungers constantly for food. And then there's Delores, earthy, solicitous and who insinuates herself into Gordon's life and who tries to do the best by him and feeds off his private needs and loneliness. When Gordon discovers that his brother, Dennis is having an affair with a local realtor, he feels obliged to tell his wife, Lisa, because he just can't spend his whole life turning his back, not seeing and never doing the honorable thing. Gordon is someone who needs the "anonymity of blank spaces" yet he has not realized how strange freedom would be, how alien he would feel. How we remake our lives and what we do with the life we are given is at the thematic core of A Hole in the Universe. And some readers may find Morris's view of the world unintentionally bleak, as she sees us as no more than "inconsequential flees jumping through our preordained hoops in a meaningless cosmos, hopeless, helpless, and blameless." Morris also delves into the psyche of the criminal and postulates that just as criminals are locked up to protect society, so are the imprisoned safe from society's expectations and nuances. Activities such as paying bills, entering relationships, and holding down a job are probably unfathomable language for some men. In Gordon Loomis, Morris gives us a stalwart, sturdy and robust character that persev

I found "A Hole in the Universe" to be Morris' best novel since "A Dangerous Woman" (which I loved and highly reccomend), because what she does in these two novels is what she does better than almost anyone else: she brilliantly captures the essence of characters who are on the fringes of society; those who are socially inept, socially shunned, those "too needy" for other people's confort levels. She very craftily makes her readers both sympathetic, and at the same time repelled, by her characters.