Tracer

By Frederick Barthelme

Subjects: Divorce, Fiction, Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Sisters

Description: Shortly after his divorce, Martin flies to Fort Meyers to spend a weekend with his former sister-in-;aw, Dominica. Within hours the two have become lovers. Thus begins a tangled affair that will involve them in a strange erotic triangle when Martin's ex-wife, Alex, also arrives. Tracer is Frederick Bartheline's most powerful work to date, a short novel of stunning force and beauty written with all the author's celebrated talents and with a toughness of theme and insight that grip the reader from the first page. In it Bartheline examines with brilliant effect the struggle between our conscious motives and the buried world of half-understood emotion and desire. The novel unfolds against a series of bizarre and sinister episodes now comic, now darkly ominous. A stranger arrives and pulls a loaded gun. Dominica's ex-husband shows up unexpectedly on a motorcycle, strange signs appear at the door overnight. All remains undefined, slightly out of focus-though etched with a brilliance that makes the situation even more eerie. Against this background Bartheline portrays the shifting relationship among his three major figures with mounting tension and suspense. The lens zooms from the humorous to the touching to the devastating. Tracer is unforgettable, Publisher's Weekly wrote of Second Marriage. Bartheline's previous novel, that it "admits its fabricator to the front ranks of contemporary writers." Tracer confirms such praise. It is a masterly tale about sex, love, marriage, and the deep forces that play beneath the surface of our lives. With it Bartheline triumphantly secures his place among the best of our contemporary novelists.