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Title: The Flaw by Cynthia Baer ISBN: 0-7388-3577-3 Publisher: Xlibris Corporation Pub. Date: November, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.99

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Compelling First Novel Offers Updated Gothic
Comment: First time novelist, Cynthia Baer, offers a fine dish of updated Gothic in "The Flaw" about the righteous tyranny of family matriarch Leah Weitzman. Like Medea, "The Flaw" draws a tale of jealousy and outrageous revenge by a woman who has been discarded by her husband. The story revolves around the three generations of Leah's family. Her children include insecure Ruth, neglected Albert jr., and an angry Martha Glass now married to Ben Glass who functions as the family patriarch, serving as Leah's puppet and clean-up crew. Martha and Ben's children include Fran, Beth and Annie, four year's old when the story opens.

Though the story is told from an omniscient point of view, it is the lens of Annie's eye that most clearly reveals the dark heart of her beloved grandmother, affectionately called Lady Boo until the fateful day in 1935, fifteen years after the presumed death of Leah's beloved husband Albert. Leah calls the clan to her invalid's bed to reveals the lie of the family's past as Baer offers a new twist on the live burial that is the favorite conventional punishment in Gothic novels. Leah confesses their father just died two days ago, having spent the lost years in a remote monastery off the coast of Sardinia where Leah banished him after learning of his affair with a beautiful young war orphan.

The medieval time period of the Gothic novel that flourished through the early nineteenth century is updated. The traditional gloomy castle is replaced with Leah's five-story "dark, silent and forbidding" Chicago mansion replete with turrets and gables where the matriarch of the family resides and rules over the family. The subterranean passages of Leah's mind and overweening ego map the world of the novel.

"The Flaw" brilliantly uses the Gothic convention of dealing with the sudden, mysterious inaccessibility of those things that should normally be most accessible as the family, in shock, endures the grotesque memorial service that follows Leah's confession and the archival presentation of the lost years of their father's life, irretrievably cut off from them forever. Upon their return home two days later, the three Glass girls solemnly swear never to call grandmother anything but Leah, because they can never love her the same way, because "Lady Boo killed Poor Grandpapa."

Baer constructs an increasingly horrific portrait of Leah, whose opium addiction and imaginary ailments are minor flaws in the face of her greatest failing, an outrageous and willful righteousness, outwardly represented by a large scar of crimson, pink and brown that has marked her from the early age of eight when her hair went up in flames while roasting marshmallows.

"The Flaw" is compelling and a welcome return to the Gothic mansions of the mind. Exploiting the alternating mystery and cruelty that are Leah's handmaidens throughout the book, Baer evokes a chilling terror in the reader for the reach across generations of one woman's selfish revenge. "The Flaw" lacks the traditional medieval setting but skillfully develops the Gothic atmosphere of gloom and horror and unerringly draws Leah's aberrant psychological state.
Georgia Flosi
Author of "The Remnant" available Feb 2002