Face Value

When Jasper Whiting, eminent plastic surgeon, leaves his conventional home and family to go and live by himself in a run-down block of houses in Boston's North End, he does not imagine how his life and all he has lived for will be transformed by the people he encounters there: by the bizarrely beautiful and preternaturally wise, one-legged model Luigi Sasekawa; by the boy upstairs, the quadraplegic Sloan Glintz, who inspires such devotion in all who help to care for him; and most of all by Rhoda Massler, virtuoso teacher of the handicapped and later director of a guerrilla opera for and about them, from whom Jasper, too, learns to love. And when the cripples of the city begin to band together, to turn visible under the leadership of Rhoda's charismatic friend, the ex-priest Alex Thane, with a revolution of these 'wretched of the earth' in the making, Jasper as well is required to act, to declare himself, as nothing in his past has ever made him do before. Don Bloch's new novel, visionary in theme but solidly contemporary in setting, is funny, troubling and passionate. Like Jasper Whiting, its readers may be surprised at the force with which they too are drawn into the flashpoint world of this adventurous fiction.