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Vine, Barbara

The Chimney Sweeper's Boy

New York, Harmony Books (Crown Publishers). 343 pp. US $24.00.

Gerald Candless, a best-selling and internationally famous novelist, dies from a heart attack. He leaves behind a wife and two daughters.

To work through her grief, one of his doting daughters decides to write a biography of her father.

One of the perennial issues in literary theory is whether and to what extent authors put themselves, their characters and their lives, into their books. Barbara Vine in her role as psychologist and navigator of the human psyche raises this issue with a vengeance. There is no way that the daughter can understand the father unless she understands his books ... but where in his books is he? The more she digs, the worse the portrait gets. How come her widowed mother is not grief-stricken at the loss as much as the daughter? A long-forgotten murder surfaces.

Barbara Vine also shows the extent to which, given a dark past, there is a need to reinvent oneself and when dissatisfied with the reinvented persona, to do it all over again ... and yet confess.

The quotations at the head of every chapter are delightful. And the widow does find a different kind of happiness with another man.

Barbara Vine, pen name of Baroness Rendell, nee Grasemann, lives in the country and in London.