Sometimes, all a novel has to do to succeed is find a new way to look at a familiar place.


In The Perfect Reader by Maggie Pouncey, that familiar place is a small New England college town, the subject of many an insider novel. But in this case, the town is regarded with bemused affection by someone who, although she lived there for many years, never felt at home.

Flora Dempsey, in her late 20s and working in New York at "a magazine for the domestically obsessive and organically minded," impulsively quits her job when her father, Lewis, dies. She moves back home to the little house he has left her in Darwin, "three hours from everywhere."

Her father, former president of Darwin College, has appointed Flora his literary executor, or, as she sometimes thinks of it, his "literary executioner."

Flora has never read her father's highly popular critical tome Reader as Understander, much less the sheaf of recently written poems he handed her at their last meeting. So she is surprised to find herself accosted by the subject of those erotic poems, art historian Cynthia. Cynthia is eager to get the poems into print - and to get herself recognized as their muse.

The Perfect Reader moves back and forth between the year Flora spends in Darwin (trying to come to terms with her father's death and her own life) and flashbacks to the year her parents divorced.

Plot isn't Pouncey's strong suit. She signals most surprises far ahead of time, and when they arrive, they are less than overwhelming. Instead, this is a novel of small, sentence-by-sentence pleasures.

Villains don't have a place here: Flora's parents, vastly different, both have valid points of view. Her father, with his scorn for computers and white bread, is thoroughly at home in Darwin. Her mother, who dresses in black and dyes her hair "an alarming shade of purple," longs to return to New York.

Once they're divorced, only child Flora experiences them as "the sun and the moon, only rarely inhabiting the same sky, and when it happened, the feeling eclipselike - exhilarating, and unnerving."

The novel excels as a portrait of a young adult whose "self hasn't yet jelled," and who hasn't quite separated herself from her parents.