A long-ago kidnaping case all but abandoned resurfaces, yet its memory of lives put aside almost screens itself with a population of new life. Neighborhoods of New York, of Brooklyn Heights, a larger uncertain and disturbing America of the 1960s, this fable of a man’s obsession revisits people as clues while at the center, with deceptive scope, his temporarily estranged wife’s voice gathers and regathers what it is that he and she and their child have curiously going for them. All these unfolding circles of understanding in a mixed language distinctly American, by turns satirical, lyrical, eccentric, even a solvent at times simplifying the prevailingly urban as bucolic. A city pastoral Joseph McElroy called his second novel when it first appeared in 1969; now, a half century later, we may experience in Hind’s Kidnap a society reaching outward almost like a planet at risk, persons who would be dekidnaped to become ends in themselves, fiction as prophecy.
