"Preservation Hall," with its deeply personal passion and anguish, is in fact in the province of a first novel, yet it's written with such expert control that one is glad the author waited to tackle its larger theme. Set in New York and in the Maine wilderness, subjecting its characters to the isolating cataclysm of a storm, the novel stings at our age-old fears and makes the pain seem fresh and revelatory. Virgil and Tracy Morgan, successful, likable New Yorkers, have gone to their country property for a winter holiday…. But not until a crisis is visited on the younger Morgans that holiday week through an invasion by another couple … will a catharsis be forced. No longer immune, Virgil will mourn his past insufficiency of feeling and attempt a retribution that will shatter his comfortable life.