Things to Be Lost

by Lionel Newton

That's Randall Roberts talking, with laserlike vision and a voice as biting as a snap of a whip. He's talking about his father, a successful psychiatrist burdened by the masochistic tendencies of a Jesus Christ complex. About his mother, whose obsession with social status and appearance has transformed a family's love into obligation. About his married sister, Sonny, struggling with the travails of marriage, and his other sister, Yolanda, a.k.a. Yogi, out to give a new definition to rebellion. And, of course, he's talking about his own twelve-year-old self, an introvert on the verge of giving in to violent impulses. Lionel Newton's first novel, Getting Right with God, established him as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction. Now he extends and enhances that distinction with this absorbing novel about the disintegration of a black middle-class family within the sweet serenity of suburban Long Island. This deterioration begins when the father, deeply troubled and increasingly di