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Three Hearts Join To Find Port in a Storm

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By Joe Coomer

Graywolf Press,

245 pp., $22.95

Often the death of a loved one occasions in the survivor a psychological and emotional excavation of the heart. What did this person mean to me? What did I mean to him or her? How or when will I ever get over the loss, fill the void?

''Beachcombing for a Shipwrecked God,'' by Joe Coomer, is a fascinating study of grief and the doubt and self-searching that emotion prompts in three women.

At the outset, none of the women's lives is on solid ground, literally and figuratively. They share a permanently docked boat. Each is searching for more secure footing: one for the truth about her relationship with her now gone husband; one for the life that appears to be slipping away; and one for a future to forge out of less-than-fortuitous circumstances.

Charlotte is an archaeologist who has just lost her husband in an accident. Stunned and oppressed by her own sadness, she flees both her home in Kentucky, and her devastated in-laws who cling too much, and moves to the coastal New Hampshire town of Portsmouth. There she takes up residence with the two other women who are also at odds with life.

A widow named Grace owns the boat, the Rosinante. Grace goes around town painting trompe d'oeil scenes (''I want to paint a puddle of water on a street with a nickel in the middle of the water. I want to paint it so persuasively that people break their knuckles putting their hand in the water going after that nickel.'') Grace is afraid of losing her memory, in effect losing her life in dribs and drabs. ''I'm always trying to remember something I've forgotten, trying to resurrect a little death, to make myself immortal by the power of my memory. It's all very humbling,'' she says.

The third woman is Chloe, a fat and somewhat peculiar teenager. She is estranged from her parents and entangled with a rather menacing good-for-nothing boyfriend. She also happens to be pregnant.


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