Novelist Jill Ciment’s characters Ruth and Alex are 45-years-married New Yorkers with a mass of aches and pains: hearing aid batteries, jumping nerve syndrome, and thick-lensed trifocals. Nevertheless, they remain sharp as tacks, partly because Ruth (a retired literature teacher) is never without her portable Chekhov, and Alex (an artist) stays busy on an important retrospective: illuminating every single page of his once subversively sexy wife’s FBI file. Addtionally, they often think in tandem. For example, when on a winter weekend, their beloved octogenarian dachshund, Dorothy, slips a disc, they are already out the door with leash and blanket, battling insane uptown traffic with fierce single-mindedness: get Dorothy to the vet’s emergency room.
Never mind that this weekend in particular is the one where their “sun-flooded” co-op hits the New York Times real estate listings with its million-dollar asking price, or that in post 9/11 Manhattan, a gasoline truck with a suspicious driver named Pamir seems to be “stuck” in the Midtown Tunnel. This event sends Fox Newsworthy sound-biters into a moronic frenzy of television coverage, debate, and polling: Isn’t Muslim really a language? Do terrorists take drugs? And, what can a forensic expert with training in paranormal activity and “badly applied lipstick” tell us about your run-of-the-mill jihadist?
Soon, the FBI has Pamir surrounded in a Bed, Bath and Beyond, while a frantic bidding war ensues over Alex and Ruth’s apartment, and Dorothy’s tail is put to the ultimate test.
Love, faith, and the significance of a canine “wee-wee pad” make Jill Ciment’s Heroic Measures not only a small but elegant time-bomb of surprising suspense, but, at long last, a book without a lab on the cover.
A 2010 Adult Summer Reading Club recommendation