Book Review : Magical Plot, Characters Transcend Urban Decay

Second Sight by Mary Tannen (Knopf: $16.95; 259 pages)

Ask for this book by author, not by title, because another novel with the identical name is also scheduled for this month. This is the one you’ll want--a magical transformation of an ugly, decaying New Jersey industrial town into a place where the least likely of romances can thrive; a cast of characters so atypical that they glow with incandescent vitality, a plot blending mysticism with gritty contemporary reality.

The heroine is a high school dropout, the daughter of Wallingford’s most prominent citizen. Delia Bird rebelled against her family to marry the son of a blind Puerto Rican fortuneteller, and after her husband’s death she manages, with a little help from the welfare bureau, to support herself and her 12-year-old son as a psychic.

No Marketable Skills

Delia Bird’s professional name is Destiny Ortega, chosen from a placard in front of a Times Square strip club. Rejected by an employment agency because she has no marketable skills, Delia sets up shop in her apartment, a rotting mansion once used as a brothel. As Jaime Ortega’s bride, she had willingly helped out in the family’s occupation of dispensing potions and charms, listening to her gifted husband offering advice to lovelorn and desperate clients.

Though she lacks his unique charisma, “she could, under the name of Destiny Ortega, see certain things,” and within a short time her reputation extends beyond the New Jersey barrio to New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. Her clients phone in with their questions, and by concentrating intently on her tarot cards, Destiny produces amazingly sound and explicit answers. When we first see her, she’s advising a young actress whose career has been at a standstill since she’s been living with a famous director. Destiny’s instructions not only “reestablish the grid” for the actress, but persuade the skeptical director that Destiny is a true psychic with a clear view into the unknowable future.

Graduate Student

Destiny is only one of the wonderfully realized originals in “Second Sight.” Will Appleyard, scion of the town’s other leading family, is an over-age, balding graduate student struggling to finish his doctorate. After several false starts, he’s finally settled on the history of his birthplace for his dissertation, a decision that brings him to Delia’s mother’s house as a boarder.

Abandoned 15 years before by her philandering husband, Nestor, Lavinia Bird lives alone in the family seat, a fake medieval castle built as a movie set, keeping everything in readiness for Nestor’s return, while Nestor himself maintains bachelor digs on the other side of the city, aware of his eccentric family but paying them no attention.

His Set of Troubles

Nestor has troubles of his own. Not only has his young second wife left him, but he’s become involved with an unscrupulous real estate speculator in a redevelopment scam that has embroiled him in Wallingford’s flourishing underworld.

The principals also include Destiny’s in-laws, the Ortega family, dominated by the doyenne of seers, the blind Senora, a formidable presence despite age and disability. There’s also Destiny’s brisk and liberated sister, Cass, in San Francisco, who provides a stark contrast to Destiny’s childlike innocence, a naivete just this side of mental incompetence.

Guided only by her acute instincts, Destiny has brought up her son Lazaro to resist the worst perils of his environment, though recently she’s become aware of a “hard glint” to his aura, a development that revives her faith and her interest in “The One”--the perfect gentle lover who will magically appear to take care of them both, the man who will be her beloved Jaime’s worthy successor. For a relatively short novel, “Second Sight” has a broad cross-section of characters, many of them playing minor roles, but not one of them expendable.

Unfolding Tale

The ties among these interrelated modern lives are tightened by the gradually unfolding tale of the past connections between the Appleyard and the Bird families, a tangled and fascinating history discovered by Will Appleyard in the course of his academic research. Unifying these complex themes and extraordinary personalities is the city itself, a once bucolic paradise ruined by exploitation and neglect, abandoned by those who were once its proudest citizens. Though Wallingford today might seem to be a paradigm of urban blight, Tannen invests the city with an energy few writers would see and even fewer celebrate.