Character study Nancy Reisman’semotional Desire BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ
	The First Desire By Nancy Reisman. Pantheon, 320 pages, $24.

When writer Nancy Reisman moved from her hometown of Buffalo to New England in the early ’90s (she taught at RISD for five years), she thought she was leaving the city behind. But in her just-published first novel, The First Desire (Pantheon), Buffalo is almost as much a character as the five Cohen siblings and their recently-widowed father. Reisman comes to the Providence Public Library on Wednesday, October 20, for a free author discussion and book signing (call 455-8003 for reservations and details).

Reisman began writing about Buffalo and some of the characters in its tightly knit Jewish community at the end of World War II in her award-winning collection of short stories, House Fires (1999). In The First Desire, she returns to that era — though she stretches the time period from 1929 to 1949 — and to that milieu, in which both her parents and grandparents had lived.

"I miss the people from that generation," Reisman reflected, in a phone conversation from a hotel room in Madison, Wisconsin, an early stop on her book tour. "I miss their stories and their gossip and the names that would float up: all the Idas and the Pearls. And the suggested stories, such as an incident where someone had disappeared from town and you think, ‘Well, what was that about?’ and then you don’t hear the rest."

"For me, as a fiction writer, that’s a really nice point to enter it," she continued. "Because if I know too much, I feel a fidelity to the truth, and when I don’t know quite as much, I have more room to invent."

And so she does. The narrative arc of The First Desire is set in motion by the news that Goldie, the oldest of the Cohen children and the only one born in the Ukraine, from which her parents emigrated, is missing. After the death of her mother, Goldie had conscientiously run the household that consists of her two younger sisters, brother, and father, and she worked at the local library. It’s through the eyes of Sadie, the only sibling to escape the family enclave, by marrying a dentist and setting up her own household, that the reader first learns of Goldie’s disappearance.

But that perspective shifts among several characters throughout this engrossing story: Jo, the unmarried sister who types in the office of her father’s lawyer, develops an unrequited crush on another typist and is fated to look out for her mentally imbalanced sister Celia; Irving, the spoiled brother, who squanders any money he earns at his father’s jewelry store on cards, drink, and women; Lillian, mistress of the Cohen father, Abe, and sister to his lawyer; and Goldie herself.

"Some of the characters are more fun, some of them are more troubled but equally powerful," Reisman admitted. "I didn’t expect Lillian to be as prominent a character as she turned out to be, but I found myself really interested in her. Lillian’s not a conventional woman in the mores of that time and place. Her life would have been really different had she been born in Manhattan or born 40 years later. I think that’s true for a lot of these characters."

What’s also true is that Reisman takes us inside these characters in a way that lingers long after the book is finished. It’s as if her descriptions of their deepest secrets and dreams (never in a confessional or sentimental way) make us think about our own inner lives and thereby make us feel very much at home with these people.

"One thing that has helped me with writing about characters is an awareness of the relationship between the emotional life and the physical life," Reisman observed. "To think about how it feels in a character’s body at any given moment; how they’re experiencing things through their senses. That often reveals much more than the character can say. It often gives a tip-off to the complexity of emotions."

"Often when I’m trying to imagine a scene or moment, there is this questions of: ‘What is the light like? What’s around the character?’ " she added. "It’s almost like a kind of lucid dreaming, trying to make that as clear as possible to myself."

Thus, the moisture of nearby Lake Erie settles on Sadie’s skin; Jo draws in a sharp breath of frigid air; Celia revels in the sun and dirt of her flower and vegetable garden. And we picture the stores and houses, the streets and parks of Buffalo, where these sisters trudge through the Great Depression and tough it out during the war years. Reisman did research in the vertical files of the Buffalo Historical Society, looking at photographs, old menus, train schedules; she interviewed older people about their experiences of the city during that era. She also walked the old neighborhoods and paid attention to the weather.

"Places that we live in as children become very enmeshed in how we make meaning, in how we learn to understand the world," Reisman affirmed. "We’re linked to that particular place."

Certainly Reisman has taken familiar aspects of Buffalo and turned them into psychological threads in the novel: the coldness of winters show up in the stern coldness of Abe Cohen; the overwhelming rush of noise at nearby Niagara Falls and the quiet underneath it is mirrored in the roiling, tumbling emotions in all the sisters and the silence they seek out to soothe themsevles in troubled times. And the extremes of Buffalo’s weather, from the heat of August to the restricting ice and snow of February, are like the contrast between the burning desires inside each character and the chilling effect of the limits their lives have placed upon them.

Reisman currently lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a visiting associate professor at the University of Michigan, and the climate and landscape remind her of Buffalo. But she often yearns to live in Providence again, where the support of the Providence Area Writers Group was invaluable in getting her to concentrate on her own work as well as her teaching. She still emphasizes how much she learns from her students, as well as from "the family storytelling voices" that she hears so well.

Certainly this sprawling story of intertwining family relationships bears that out, and Reisman underscores her attempt in the novel: "It’s about the failures and the persistence of family love." That is especially evident in her portrayal of child-parent relationships: a nurturing father-child connection for Lillian contrasts with the Cohen siblings and their father; a horrible mother-child interaction for Lillian stands out against the Cohen siblings’ warm feelings about their mother.

"You go to the places in yourself where maybe you’ve experienced something like that or where those emotions would reside, and you explore them in this other context," Reisman noted.

And when an author does that as well as Reisman has in The First Desire, in such shimmering prose, she creates unforgettable characters and a novel that will leave an indelible mark on its readers.