Midlife Meltdown
The hero of Cathie Pelletier?s new novel is no Hemingway.
By Elizabeth Hand
Cathie Pelletier has built a reputation (two reputations: she also writes under the name K.C. McKinnon) on modest, character-driven novels that draw heavily on small-town settings, pithy dialogue, and careful observation of the web of connections spun by folks whose lives are bounded by everyday, rather than extraordinary, events. The two McKinnon weepies, Dancing at the Harvest Moon and Candles on Bay Street, are soft-focus, Lifetime Television-ready confections, heavy on the estrogen (female midlife crises, rekindling of old and new loves, untimely death, etc.
