Liam's Going

A Novel

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by Michael Joyce

McPherson & Co.

Due/Published August 2002, 200 pages, cloth

ISBN 0929701666

Hélène Cixous recently remarked that "Michael Joyce is a subliminal explorer--he sets off to explore mental regions that are generally neglected, as if they were forests or deserted islands. . . . This is the secret of great poetical writing."

This weekend Liam's going away to college, and his mother, Cathleen Hogan Williams, is taking him there, driving south along the Hudson. For Liam, impatience to arrive at a new destination rubs against the anxiety of a future apart. For Cathleen, the trip has a second purpose: a long-suppressed love affair she had before conceiving him has resurfaced in a poem she is trying to write. Noah, her husband, endures the new separation at homeÉuntil an elderly Irish enchantress, a client of his law practice, leads him to recalculate what he himself may have left behind in his youth. For this couple, married and alone, Liam's going ripples outward across the surface of their marriage, the melange of their intertwining memories.