Martin Sloane is a spare, evocative little novel about love and loss. It's authoritatively written and conjures a pleasant low-key melancholy. It reads quickly.

It is not, however, particularly memorable. Which is puzzling -- the story begins powerfully and narrator Jolene and her best friend Molly fascinate throughout.

The trouble seems to lie with the title character, who is perhaps even more a cypher than author Redhill intended. Yes, the crux of the tale revolves around Jolene's, and our, inability to truly know Sloane. Yet as a character in a fiction he seems so tenuously drawn, despite lengthy, structurally awkward flashbacks to his childhood, that one must take Jolene & Molly's interest in him on faith.

Moreover, Sloane is clearly based upon artist Joseph Cornell and his mysterious, magical boxes. Aside from dry catalog listings opening each section, Sloane's boxes are barely described. To choose a subject as distinct as Cornell's luminous work and then barely utilize it feels like a cheat. Perhaps unfairly, I spent much of the book wondering what a writer like Steven Millhauser would do with such an opportunity.

This is a nicely written little book, but there's some crucial element missing from it.

Martin Sloane is a novel worthy of the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Award, Governor's General Award and/or any other noteworthy award for distinctive, discriptive, and evocative literature. The novel tugs at the central core of the reader's heart and mind by taking you into the interior and intertwining lives of the main characters, Martin, Joleen, and Molly. The author, writes with deft clarity and an uncanny understanding of human foibles,and evokes powerful emotions of happiness and pain in the reader.

Martin is an artist with a deep and dark past with an erstwhile desire to come to grips with his past when he embarks upon a love affair with a young woman who might have been his soul-mate, had he allowed himself to accept the depth of her love and understanding. Unfortunately, the meddling and controlling influence of Molly, Joleen's best-friend dooms the relationship by grabbing at the fragile psyche of Martin through a jealous encounter with him when she attempts to expose to him his weaknesses and motivations during a visit to the couple's home after years of separation after college from Joleen. Molly, thereafter, embarks upon a vicarious desire to live through the lives of these two people by trying to re-establish a connection between them that spans from the US to Ireland all the while trying to mend her shattered friendship with Joleen. Joleen, glistens as the true survivor as all who read this book will find.

This is a novel worthy of reading for those who love good literature. Martin Sloane was a reading experience of exceptional magnitude that I did not beyond my wildest expectations hope to find between the covers of this marvelous novel when I purchased it.

Accolades for a book of the quality of MARTIN SLOANE cannot match the intrinsic gleam of this mutifacteted jewel of creation. Michael Redhill apparently spent 10 years from the time of first release of this novel in Canada revising, polishing, perfecting this extended poem-like novel and the energy he spent is apparent only in the fact that the end result is as close to perfection as a first novel can get. This does not feel like a "over-worked, struggling idea" that some might expect of a novel revised a dozen times. We are only aware of a lustrous story beautifully rendered.

MARTIN SLOANE is basically the story of a man who quietly tries to discover the events of his childhood by creating collage boxes - three dimensional constructions of art in the manner of Joseph Cornell. A recluse, he is "discovered" by a Bard College freshman by the name of Jolene Iolas who invites him to exhibit the works she cannot purchase in the gallery of her college, an event that leads to a ten year relationship between the 54 year old Martin and the 19 year old Jolene. Living in two cities they carry on a strange existence at once supportive and threatening. When Martin suddenly, by night, walks away into obscurity, Jolene mourns his absence, then proceeds with her life in temporary zones, until she finally traces Martin's 'lost childhood' to his origins in Ireland. This is a greatly oversimplified synopsis, excluding many twists and turns and characters, but that is basically our story.

The beauty of this book is in the writing, the poetic use of language, the sensitive interplay of flashbacks that at times take some work on the part of the reader to determine which voice is narrating. This is a paean to the universal feelng of loss of person when age reminds us that our childhood can never be retrieved, much less be completely and wholly known or understood. Had we the ability to enter our child's space, get to know the 'me' hidden there, we might be more adept at coping with love and relationships. The dance of memory with make-believe, reality with imagination, child truth with adult fiction - all these components make this story far more than simply the enormously well-told novel that it is. This book is a work of great beauty and a gift to the fortunate reader who happens upon it. A gleamingly fine novel.