Heroic measures

by Jill Ciment

From the author of The Tattoo Artist ("Beautifully written"--Alice Sebold; "Boldly conceived"--The New York Times Book Review), a new novel--taut, moving, accomplished--set in a fraught, post-9/11 New York... about real estate, dog love, and a city on alert. A gasoline tanker truck is "stuck" in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked . . . . Is this the next big attack? Alex, an artist, and Ruth, a former schoolteacher with an FBI file as thick as a dictionary, must get their beloved dachshund, whose back legs have suddenly become paralyzed, to the animal hospital sixty blocks north. But the streets of Manhattan are welded with traffic. Their dog, Dorothy, twelve-years-old and gray-faced, is the emotional center of Alex and Ruth's forty-five-year-long childless marriage. Using a cutting board as a stretcher, they ferry the dog uptown.This is also the weekend that Alex and Ruth must sell their apartment. While house hunters traipse through it during their open house, husband and w