Deep in the Heart

Sharon Oard Warner offers a key to her ambitious debut, Deep in the Heart, in one character's experiment in "intentional pentimento": "Pentimento referred to the way an old painting sometimes found its way to the surface of a newer one, rising like a phantom. Back when canvas was hard to come by, artists often whited out their less successful pieces and started over. But the old painting wasn't always gone. Sometimes, bits and pieces of it reappeared, the old forcing itself on the new." In a novel ostensibly about a woman's decision to have an abortion and its dramatic reverberations, the past remains as live and frangible and menacing as the present. Penny and Helen, two women on whom the story turns, both live in Austin, Texas. And though they never meet, each one's experiences reflect and comment on the other's with an understated complexity.

Penny is a reluctant member of the Gospel Fellowship led by Dr. Bill, an evangelical minister who is one part Garth Brooks, one part Billy Graham. He enlists his acolytes in an antiabortion protest that begins at the same clinic where Helen chooses to end a pregnancy that at 40 took her by surprise and for which she feels ill-suited. She does so without consulting her husband, Carl, and when he arrives too late to stop her, Dr. Bill finds an unwitting martyr for his campaign. The author refuses to take sides though. It would be impossible when life as she perceives it is as defiantly layered as it is changeable: Helen expertly parents teenagers in her role as assistant principal yet has not recovered from the loss of her own mother at age 16. Penny, still a virgin at 23 and raised by her formidable grandmother, thinks of love as a distant and unknowable commodity, the same way she views her mother and father respectively, and is baffled by Dr. Bill's persistent attentions. Even the minister's sanctimoniousness is steeped in real loss. Every moment is freighted with others. As casually as Deep in the Heart seems to proceed--taking you from a mall to a girl's high school bathroom with humor and affection--it is firm in its message of tolerance and its perception that even destruction and everyday accidents can be blessings. --Amy Grace Loyd