The Ice Chorus
By Sarah Stonich
Little, Brown, 336 pp., $24.95
The Tea House on Mulberry Street
By Sharon Owens
Putnam, 336 pp., $15
Lady Luck’s Map of Vegas
By Barbara Samuel
Ballantine, 304 pp., $23.95
Adultery is always a favorite in fiction. Fashions in subject matter come and go, but infidelity, with its powerful taboo and infinite plot possibilities, is always with us. These three novels turn, in various ways, on faithlessness.
Sarah Stonich tells a complex story of passion, betrayal, and rebirth in ''The Ice Chorus," her second novel. Liselle, a documentary filmmaker, flees Toronto to live by herself in a dilapidated little house by the sea in rural Ireland, far away from the tourist track. She has been drawn to the bleak setting after seeing it in a painting executed by her lover, Charlie, a talented artist. Their story, and much of this novel, is told in flashbacks. They meet when Liselle travels to Mexico to join her archeologist husband, Stephen. The emotional intimacy and sexual intensity of her relationship with Charlie forces her finally to see the shortcomings of her loveless marriage. Still, she is unable to bring herself to leave Stephen, and she fears upsetting her close relationship with their 18-year-old son, Adam. When Charlie mounts an exhibition in Toronto of nude portraits of Liselle, Stephen puts the pieces together. ''We've been humiliated," he tells her, characteristically. Alone in Ireland, thinking about her marriage and the affair with Charlie, Liselle is haunted by disturbing memories of her own beloved father, who was unfaithful to her mother. She begins to understand the lasting effect her father's infidelity has had on her.
