Visible City
Nina, a lawyer turned stay-at-home-mom of three-year-old Max and baby Lily, takes to looking out the window of her Upper West Side apartment into the building across the street. She’s particularly drawn to the window of a middle-aged husband and wife who seem to share their solitude with the young woman on crutches living with them. Nearby construction of luxury apartments, replacing old torn-down buildings, brings people outside, and Nina meets Leon, a psychologist, the man she has been watching, whose wife, Claudia, turns out to be the college teacher whose class Nina loved and whose daughter, Emma, with her broken ankle, becomes the babysitter beloved by Max and Lily. As connections form between characters, including Claudia as well as Nina’s husband, Jeremy, a disenchanted real-estate lawyer, looking into the lives of others helps them move toward watersheds in their own lives. In a departure from her earlier faith-based novels (The Ladies’ Auxiliary, 1999; The Outside World, 2004), Mirvis focuses her artful prose on the inner lives of modern women and those they love as they face the possibilities of change. --Michele Leber