Twenty-five years ago, I read an article by Robert Coles that continues to influence my reading habits. This maverick pro-fessor of psychiatry at Harvard agued passionately and persuasively that great novelists can probe the depths of psy-chology and theology with greater insight and precision than the vast majority of professionals in these overly specialized fields. While his students hold Freud and Erickson in one hand, they must also learn to juggle Charles Dickens, George Elliot, and Walker Percy in the other.

Of course, turgid prose is not bounded by the disciplines of philosophy and theology. Poets, novelists, and, most espe-cially, literary critics can sink the best of readers under the weight of their verbal overload. I suffer from the recurrent heartbreaks and headaches that come from writers who strain to demonstrate their originality. Yet I remain a reader of fiction over the years because this genre feeds my soul as no other. Some of the best conversations that I have experienced among Christians and Jews have revolved around novels mem-orably puzzled over and disputed under the glow of candlelight at a table with cup and plate filled.

In the hopes that the friends and supporters of the ICJS will find themselves in similar circumstances, I want to recommend three novels that might sustain searching conversations well into the night. All are elegantly constructed and pull the reader into enthralling worlds where the struggles of family are mirrored with uncommon care.

My first recommendation is Myla Goldberg's Bee Season (Doubleday, 2000), a first novel that has received a great deal of literary acclaim in recent months. I suspect that the attrac-tion lies in the quirky obsessions of the characters and their unsettled and unsettling convergence at the book's conclu-sion. Yet my interest resides in Eliza, a young Jewish girl whose unsuspected genius brings to light the unrecognized fragility of her family. Beneath all appearances of mediocrity, Eliza is blessed with a prodigious gift: the power to unlock the constitutive elements of words. Not only does this talent, once discovered, lift her to prominence as a spelling prodigy, but her ability to receive a word's essence also reflects an uncanny aptitude for the Jewish mysticism associated with Kabbalah. So her quest is not simply to win accolades as a national spelling bee champion, but to secure the respect and affection of her father, and, ultimately, to penetrate a spiritual domain where a secret wisdom promises to restore the frac-tures in her family. Although every member of her family is entangled in religious pursuits that verge on madness, Eliza must finally chose where to situate herself and her family. Can healing come from the perfected order of a transcendental realm, or must she find a new place within the fractured mess of this world? Everything turns on her success or failure, or, more accurately stated, on the success of her failure. Here is Ann Tyler played in a Jewish key. I would refill the glasses and linger at the table longer to hear if the novel's music sounds differently to Jews and Christians, to men and women.

My second recommendation is The Archivist, by Martha Cooley (Little, Brown and Co., 1998), an intriguing meditation on interfaith marriage. As is so often the case, the intoxications of romantic love enable people to stumble, and occasionally leap over, the religious divides between Christians and Jews. Yet our particular traditions live in us with or without our knowing, and so we each lug around ancient memories and inherit collective debts beyond redemption. This book maps a relational chasm that opens in the face of contrasting religious temperaments, and the mysteries of this rupture are fathomed through an unlikely friendship and a rigorous reading of the life and poetry of T. S. Eliot. My Presbyterian heritage has drilled into me the firm conviction that our powers of self-deception are almost limitless. The arduous route traveled by the wounded and weary protagonists in this book is beautifully paced with surprises behind its many twists and turns. They cannot find their way by gazing directly into the uncertainties before them, but must instead depend on their peripheral vision to see themselves clearly. I would replenish the cups to discuss the ways in which intimacy is born of study, to exa-mine when silences expand into unbridgeable gaps, and to contemplate the obstacles and promises of marriage, especial-ly those that traverse religious boundaries.

My final recommendation brings the inquiry into family full circle. Susan Minot's Evening (Random House, 1998) gives voice to a woman in the throes of dying. In order to let go, she must travel behind the flurry of visits from doctors, friends, and family and enter the murky depths of an unsettled memory. A weekend in Maine, the wedding of a friend, the eruption of unruly passions, and the surprising heartbreaks that shatter the fantasies of invulnerability and entitlement provide the lens through which the protagonist can scan the ensuing decades of marriage and children. Minot probes this twilight with exceptional artistry. She charts the shifting terrain where past and present, keen concentration and delirium, twist and turn and blend and fade, and does so in a way that illuminates the indissoluble and unknowable mysteries of each and every one of us. I found nothing maudlin or sentimental driving this book. The work of the dying is to gather together the fragments, to collect oneself, and to make peace with the broken shards that are beyond repair. This is a book to be savored after dinner on the porch in quiet tones so as not to wake the kids upstairs. Before we finish our coffee and head our separate ways, we grab hold of this book so that we can momentarily hold the irreducible singularity of those we love and can never fully understand.