Refrigerator designer George Mahoney is movie-star handsome, with a beautiful wife and children and a luxurious home. But when he gets a gander at his new office mate--six-foot-tall Niagara Spense, who wears a different color of the same homemade dress every day, as well as coke-bottle-thick glasses and a hearing aid--he's knocked off his pins. Soon he and the geeky girl scientist are slipping out to lunch, where he learns of her mystical theories about electricity. As he is drawn into her experiments to find electronic evidence of life after death, he begins to reevaluate his marriage, his relationship with his children (especially his chunky budding-genius son), and his career spent designing better ice-makers and butter softeners. This is a very charming first novel that reflects the author's unusual work experience as both an industrial engineer and a writing teacher. Although the plot veers off the map on more than one occasion, Zuravleff's endearing lead characters and inventive blending of science and mysticism make this an especially appealing book. Joanne Wilkinson
From Kirkus Reviews
Polished first novel toying with the possibility that dead souls are all around us, ``broadcasting'' at weak radio frequencies. That, at least, is Zuravleff's premise, but actually her story is mostly about George Mahoney, an engineer working for a company called Coldpoint. George is a walking dead man. He has labored for 14 years on ``improvements'' for refrigerators--his triumph having been the first ice maker--but now he spends all of his time fending off his foulmouthed boss and trying to avoid the ``Veteran,'' his taciturn, burnt-out officemate. And there's trouble at home: a meticulously organized, fiercely middle-class wife who seems increasingly rigid and unimaginative, and a troubled young son who is either brilliant or disturbed. The Veteran is forced into retirement, and a homely engineer with a hearing aid, Niagara Spense, takes his place. Niagara could excel in academic life except that she'd be labeled a crackpot, since her research involves using old radios to listen in on the dead. George falls in love with her, but he merely bemuses her since she's fallen for the Veteran's son, a rock musician who also seeks to commune with the dead. Jealous George breaks into Niagara's home and, bent on sabotage, accidentally tunes in his dead mother. What she says is so startling that George's life flops over completely: He sheds the guilt his mother long ago imposed, realizes how foolish an affair with Niagara would be, and, after his son wins the science fair with an ingenious refrigeration project, comes up with the best idea he's had in years. Zuravleff backs off from her dead souls theme just when it becomes interesting. Nonetheless, her narrative offers a wry and original meditation on office politics, midlife crisis, and even mortality. Thumbs most of the way up. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“Beguiling and wildly inventive...A funny and wholly original love story that weds the everyday to the supernatural.” ―Chicago Tribune
“Read this book! Zuravleff fashions small moments of comic wonder in this novel of family and FM frequencies, magic and flirting, metaphysics and doughnuts.” ―San Diego Tribune
“Engaging...Zuravleff's insightful yet gentle rendering of the absurd [allows] readers to connect fully with her quirky and endearing characters.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“Page after page, the descriptions of the novel are laugh-out- loud funny. Smart and refreshingly tender...with a stylish ebullience reminiscent of Anne Tyler.” ―News & Observer (Raleigh)
From the Back Cover
Winner of the American Academy's Rosenthal Foundation Award
Winner of the James Jones First Novel Award
"Beguiling and wildly inventive...A funny and wholly original love story that weds the everyday to the supernatural."--"Chicago Tribune
George Mahoney suspects he is getting a little stale at redesigning refrigerators, after fourteen years in the same job. With the arrival of his new office mate, Niagara Spense, George is forced to reevaluate everything in his life from love and family, to science itself. Despite his allegiance to facts and the physical world, George becomes obsessed by the six-foot-tall Niagara, who reveals that she is on a quest for electrical evidence of life after death-"audible fossils," she calls them. As Niagara Spense seeks the dead, and George seeks her, everything suddenly becomes possible in a novel that makes engineering funny, and mixes the world of icemakers and butter softeners with the miraculous.
"Riveting ...Zuravleff has created some of the most wonderfully realized characters in current fiction."--"Dallas Morning News
"Read this book! Zuravleff fashions small moments of comic wonder in this novel of family and FM frequencies, magic and flirting, metaphysics and doughnuts."--"San Diego Tribune
"Engaging...Zuravleff's insightful yet gentle rendering of the absurd [allows] readers to connect fully with her quirky and endearing characters."--"The New York Times Book Review
"Page after page, the descriptions of the novel are laugh-out-loud funny. Smart and refreshingly tender...with a stylish ebullience reminiscent of Anne Tyler."--"News & Observer (Raleigh)
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of "The Bowl Is Already Broken.Her previous jobs include teaching writing and calculus, working in engineering plants, and editing for museums. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.
About the Author
Mary Kay Zuravleff is also the author of The Bowl Is Already Broken, which The New York Times praised as “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming,” and The Frequency of Souls, which the Chicago Tribune deemed “a beguiling and wildly inventive first novel.” Honors for her work include the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award and the James Jones First Novel Award, and she has been nominated for the Orange Prize. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a cofounder of the D.C. Women Writers Group.
