2007-12-22 A writer with a rare lyric gift...

What saves Robin Lippincott's prose from being merely beautiful, merely decorative, is its strong emotional undertow. I felt it from the first page of In the Meantime, a kind of ache of tenderness that swelled and ebbed and swelled again throughout the book; you get carried along on the feeling as though it's literally a wave, and it keeps you turning the pages without noticing the time. A lot happens in this book: it covers 70 years in the lives (and after-lives) of its three central characters, who meet at the age of five in a small Midwestern town, where they forge an ineradicable bond, and head for New York together as soon as they can escape; there they suffer all the ordinary -- as well as some extraordinary -- sorrows and disillusionments of coming up against their own and the world's limitations. In the case of the most dazzling and fragile figure here, those sorrows and disillusionments are made more intense by how much he once wanted from life, and believed would be his by right. But although the story itself is rich, and there is plenty to grip you in the events depicted, it really is Lippincott's prose, his voice as narrator, that sets it apart. It is difficult to describe that voice without resorting to contradictions. Though it is certainly sorrowful, the love he so evidently feels for his characters, and a powerful sense of joy -- he can celebrate the small pleasures of life in a way that makes it possible for the reader, too, to exult in them -- make this book anything but depressing. You close it rejoicing.