Book Discussion: THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES (Laura Kasischke)

The Beer & Cookies Book Club will be discussing THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES (288 pages)

Diana sees herself at 40 as content: happily married to a markedly older philosophy professor, mother to a daughter named Emma, spending her days sketching in her studio. She lives in the town of her childhood, but under improved economic and social circumstances: her husband is celebrated in his field; her daughter attends a local private girls' school. The few troubles in Diana's almost-middle-aged life are the recent death of her cat Timmy, whom she acquired when she was a teenager, and a growing distractedness mingled with intense headaches. Kasischke gives readers a perfectly formed mature woman, right on the heels of a prologue in which teenaged girlfriends are confronted by an armed classmate who demands they tell him which of them he should kill. In a Solomonic passage, one girl directs the gunman to herself, while the other points him toward her friend. How would a girl live with that sort of guilt, the knowledge that her friend sacrificed her own life while the one who lived told the killer to take her friend's life rather than her own?

Diana has seemingly repressed her memory of the event as well as her survivor's guilt, but her perfect world and her grip on reality are both starting to crack. These scenes are imbued with that sense of eerie apprehension found in a good horror flick. Woven through the book is a flashback narrative of Diana's sunny but empty-headed adolescent days. The novel plays teenage Diana's youthful illusions of immortality and beauty against the shifting, uneasy reality of middle age. Kasischke, also a published poet, writes prose that is dreamy and lyrical.

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