Death in Summer (review)

imparting through her well-honed prose an experience that has been confusing, painful, and strangely beautiful. Prozac Diary begins shortly after the FDA approved the use of Prozac in the late '80s, when a psychiatrist prescribed the medication to help treat Slater's obsessive-compulsive disorder and borderline personaUty disorder. She marveled at her quick reaction: "It was as though I'd been visited by a blind piano tuner . . . who had tweaked the ivory bones of my body, the taut strings in my skull, and now, when I pressed on myseU the same notes but with a mellower, milder sound sprang out." Slater recounts how, in this transformation, she both gained and lost parts of herself , since the Prozac stifled her creativity along with her compulsive behavior. As she and Prozac continued their "growing up together" her feelings about this tradeoff became more and more ambivalent, until her Prozac "poop-out" on a research trip in Kentucky which resulted in a relapse and a réévaluation of her relationship with the drug. Slater effectively intertwines the story of her ongoing Prozac use with memories of her unstable childhood and psychologicaUy disturbed mother Though she has worked as a psychologist and holds an MA in psydiology from Harvard, her account of her experience with Prozac could hardly be called clinical. Her memoir is striking for its humor, emotion and luddity. She describes how she views her chemical "crutch" at times as a lover, at times as an adversary and in the end, as "a weU-meaning buddy whose presence can considerably ease pain but cannot erase it." (JL) Death in Summer by William Trevor Viking, 1998, 214 pp., $23.95 Following his best-selling novel, Felicia's Journey, and his fine short story collection, After Rain, the prolific Trevor's twelfth novel is an impeccably wrought small tragedy that illustrates how sodai class and rircumstance are fate. Thaddeus Davenant, whose privileged but curiously neglectful upbringing has left him eminently dvilized but emotionaUy remote, has just lost his wife, Letitia, in a bicycle accident. When his mother-in-law, Mrs. Iveson, comes to help him interview prospective nannies for his infant daughter, Georgina, the two fail to find a suitable appUcant, and Mrs. Iveson stays on to take care of the baby. One of the applicants, Pettie, an unemployed orphan with forged references , is enchanted with Thaddeus' stately home, Quincunx House— a veritable palace in her eyes—and falls half in love with Thaddeus, who to her seems like a refined father figure . Pettie's only friend is the mUdy retarded Albert, who was raised with her in the Morningstar Orphanage. Privately, Albert concurs with his landlady's description of Pettie as a lost soul, a "tearaway." StiU, he helps feed and shelter her, out of loyalty and a profound, unswerving goodness that contrasts with Pettie's hard cynidsm and makes him the moral center of this quietly allegorical book. Crushed when she is turned down for the job at Quincunx House, Pettie returns there, ostensibly to look for a lost ring, scopes out the daUy routine, and later kidnaps Georgina from the 174 · The Missouri Review garden when Mrs. Iveson falls asleep whUe watching her. In the resulting panic and desperate search, Thaddeus finaUy grasps the significance of the relationships in his life: to Georgina, to Letitia, to Mrs. Iveson and to a former lover, an older woman, the now invaUd Mrs. Ferry, whose subsequent death is the second of three referred to in the book's tiUe. The third death, the tragic resolution, is not so much inevitable as perfectly justified and artfuUy staged. Trevor is a master of his craft. Ifs no smaU feat to imbue a story with symboUc substance and moral heft whUe maintaining such an economy of characters , plot and pages. (ES) The Professor and the Madman: A Tale ofMurder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester HarperCollins, 1998, 242 pp., $22 This story of the birth of the Oxford English Dictionary traces the lives of two fasdnating men: James Murray, who spent over forty years working on the first OED and stiU did not see it finished in his Ufetime...