FICTION

THE GREAT LONGING by Marcel Moring. (HarperCollins: $21.95; 211 pp.) The wandering man at the center of this novel still has his sweet marrow from childhood. Sam and his twin sister, Lisa, are 12 when their parents die in a car crash; their brother Raph is 14. The three are separated in foster homes and do not speak to each other for nine years. As they come of age, they seek each other out and reconstruct a kind of family without grown-ups, squatter runaways with real jobs and rented apartments and children’s sense of decency. They sit around many a late-night table and try to piece together what happened; their respective grapplings with love wind concentric rings around the prematurely shattered core of their lives. Of the three, Sam is the most perplexed, with almost no memory of his childhood before the crash.

The phrase, “Great Longing” could refer to many things in this book: to childhood, to lost parents, to some comfortable understanding of love but most of all to Sam’s longing for memory: “I want to love someone. My mouth moved without my meaning it to. . . . ‘I miss them so much,’ I said. ‘I want them back, Raph. And I don’t even know what they look like. And I can’t even remember what love is.’ ” Raph and Lisa protect Sam from his own past through to the very end of the book. By then, you know these characters so well, by their thoughts, their humor, their gestures, that the revelation that would scatter lesser-constructed characters to the four corners of a computer screen seems little more than a very large piece of life’s puzzle being air-brushed into place.