Writing takes wing in 'The Sky Below'

In "The Sky Below," her third and most imaginative novel to date, Stacey D'Erasmo offers, for the first time, a male protagonist. Gabriel Callahan is a dreamy, endearing but most peculiar creature. Cast out of his Edenic childhood home in Massachusetts when his father leaves and his mother takes a job running a crummy motel in Florida, Gabe begins his wait for something enormous to happen to him. He lives under the sign of Ovid's Metamorphoses, certain that the ancient gods are circling like invisible birds and will one day transform him.

As a teenager he turns to petty thievery, drug dealing and gay prostitution. But at a third-rate college in Arizona he has an epiphany on discovering Joseph Cornell's boxes. Feverishly, he begins making his own, pasting together bits and pieces, scraps of cloth and paper that, he hopes, will acquire the same ineffable aura as the originals.

The next time we meet Gabe, he is 37 and writing the obituary column for a New York City newspaper, a fitting occupation in the wake of the Twin Towers. Gabe is very much aware that thronging among the living is an ever-growing population of the dead. He squats in an apartment his older sister owns, visits his college friend and fellow artist Sarah. He has a wealthy and indulgent lover named Janos whom he keeps somewhat at arm's length. His life feels like a dead-end, a box, and yet he still imagines mysteries hovering around him, about to be unveiled.

He becomes obsessed with a house in Brooklyn he wants to buy and winds up stalking the owner and his daughter in a fit of temporary madness. He learns that he has cancer, although a "lazy" one. Is it the powerful pills he takes that persuade him that his dream of metamorphosis is coming true and that he is beginning to grow wings? He has been haunted by birds ever since he saw his sister attract a flock of them. "My sister seemed to be dissolving into them beginning with her outer edges, undoing herself into a flock of small birds streaked with gold. Her arms were their branches, her hair was their nest; the black-and-gold birds were her thoughts whirling in the air around her."

D'Erasmo's plotting is somewhat ramshackle. In a baffling last section, she sends Gabe to Mexico, where he falls in with a lovable but goofy cult whose practices revolve around the dreams and predictions of a 10-year-old girl. But maybe she needed Mexico and the cult to set up a gorgeous, tragic scene where Gabriel sits in a sacred tree with a seraphic pair of large white wings attached to his shoulder blades.

D'Erasmo writes beautifully, her sentences urgent, whispery, holding their breath as Gabe does, waiting for magic.