[In the following review, Fennell offers a mixed assessment of Black and Blue.]

“Pulitzer Prize-winner”—it is a phrase she rather likes, Anna Quindlen admitted once during a television interview. And well she should—first, because she has earned it, for her earlier New York Times column “Public & Private,” and, second, because the chief virtue of her fiction writing is the ability to dramatize an issue in a way similar to the impassioned essays that first brought her to our attention.

Black and Blue, Quindlen's third novel, is the first-person narrative of Fran Benedetto, a 38-year-old nurse and mother and frequent victim of the brutal violence inflicted on her by her husband, Bobby, a New York City police detective. For years Bobby, in his periodic fits of rage, has cursed, slapped, choked, kicked and punched Fran. She has suffered a gruesome list of injuries: broken nose, broken jaw, cracked collarbone, broken ribs, countless bruises and contusions. Finally, in desperation, she flees. Aided by a nameless organization that helps battered women escape and set up new identities, she arrives in Lake Plata, Fla., with her 10-year-old son, Robert, plus a new name, a new age, a new appearance and a new profession. But the past is not so easily escaped. The reader knows as surely as Fran does that Bobby will find her and that the encounter will be explosive. The palpable tension in the novel arises from this certainty.

Quindlen's success has a kind of cinematic quality to it; we know that the ominous Bobby is out there somewhere, searching for Fran and Robert; we know, too, that his arrival will be unexpected, sudden, violent and inescapable, just as it is with the villains in horror movies. Furthermore, Quindlen has another advantage that often belongs to movies, the ability to record faithfully the hundreds of little details that make up our everyday lives: Fran using Loving Care No. 27 California Blonde hair dye, Robert's friend, Bennie, mastering the sixth level of “Double Dragon” and mother and son reading One Fish, Two Fish together. Quindlen gives details of a “status life,” as Tom Wolfe would call them, though she does so without Wolfe's corrosive satire.

But Quindlen's greatest asset is the skill she brings with her from her days as a Times essay writer: the ability to hold up for our examination a deeply serious moral issue. Black and Blue is, if nothing else, a searing indictment of the violence men inflict upon women. While Quindlen depicts little that is new, she does incorporate much of what we have come to know about spousal abuse (male possessiveness, male inculturation, women's lack of self-esteem and the resulting helplessness, as well as the economic and familial traps by which women feel forced to return to the men who batter them). More importantly, she makes us share the pain, feel the fear and care about Fran's and Robert's fates. For the attentive reader of this novel, domestic violence can never be the object simply of polite distaste or calculated indifference.

If Black and Blue shares its strongest feature with the essay, therein also lies its greatest weakness as a novel. Quindlen can dramatize spousal abuse very well, but, as a work of fiction, Black and Blue lacks the rich texture found in the very best examples of the genre. Dickens, for example, may score early and often against corrupt lawyers or self-aggrandizing educators or toadying businessmen in Great Expectations, but we also value this novel precisely because it takes on so many issues on so many different levels, and because it paints pictures in such subtle, colorful detail, with qualities akin to a Tom Frith cityscape. Religion may not be Dickens's focus, but when it falls within the novelist's purview (even as if “by accident”), he cannot avoid making small observations about current practice or, more accurately, current forms of religious hypocrisy.

Quindlen's social portrait, in contrast, resembles an Ivan Albright portrait: harrowing, monochromatic, painted in the black and blue of Fran's bruises. To follow out the comparison, when religion enters this novel it does so only by way of notes about cultural Catholicism—Fran's wedding at St. Stanislaus (what Bobby called “the Church of the Holy Pollack”) or Robert making his first confession to Father Charles. Quindlen has little to say about religion's relevance to, or complicity in, domestic violence.

In short, Quindlen has not yet gained full control of the novelist's craft. Her male characters, for example, have nothing of Fran's complexity or her mixture of hurt, tenderness, humor and budding self-confidence. Bobby embodies malevolence, and Fran's new love interest, the gym teacher Mike Riordon, is a cipher. Moreover the reader detects clumsiness in the management of voice. How, for example, can we really fear Bobby's incursion into Fran's life when her very voice as narrator assures us of her survival? And the ending seems strangely anti-climactic, especially since an epilogue suddenly asks us to reconfigure time relationships in order to get us to a present we always thought we had been in.

Still, Anna Quindlen has sought out the qualities of novels that often matter most to people: the ability to hold up important issues to the light of public scrutiny and dramatize and humanize them—and ultimately even to galvanize them. She has welded them to the qualities that characterized her best newspaper columns. Black and Blue makes for a riveting read.