The Writing on the Wall: A Novel

For the first time, one of New York City's major resident authors spins a breathtakingly immediate, intimate family novel centered around the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Thirty-four and decidedly independent, Renata has been known to keep her involvement with people — men in particular — to a minimum. Even her job at the library keeps her at a remove from the uncertainty of trusting other people with the stories of her past. Instead she loses herself in language, ever measuring the integrity of words against lived experience. Then Jack, patient, solid, and sexy, enters her life. One bright September morning, as Renata walks across the Brooklyn Bridge to work, the sky bursts open and change comes without warning. It quickly becomes clear in the days ahead that Renata cannot keep memories of her buried past — of a twin sister, a betrayal, of family truths too ugly to acknowledge — at bay.

Written with tremendous compassion and imagination, informed by an abiding love for the people of New York, and crafted by a master storyteller at the height of her powers, The Writing on the Wall is a profoundly engaging novel about how one woman saw — and we all continue to ponder — the defining event of our time.

"The aftermath of the World Trade Center attack provides a traumatic backdrop to Schwartz's latest novel (after In the Family Way), an intellectually evocative and emotionally trenchant exploration of troubled intimacy and the constitutive effects of language. Renata, a Brooklyn-based 30-something librarian with a gift for recondite tongues, is stymied in her promising affair with fellow Brooklynite Jack by her vows of 'emotional celibacy,' the result of a long history of family trauma, including the tragic death of her twin sister, Claudia, at age 16. When the Twin Towers are struck, Jack's assistant at his downtown social services agency perishes in the collapse, and he and Renata become the caretakers of her baby, Julio. As Renata develops an obsessive attachment to the baby as well to a mute stray teenager she names after her dead niece, Gianna (born just before Claudia's death), Schwartz artfully reveals the origins of Renata's psychic scars: the twins' overenmeshed relationship, the death of their father and institutionalization of their mother, plus Gianna's mysterious drowning. Renata's emotional wariness links to her suspicions of language in general, which are exacerbated by the president's verbal response to the terrorist attack. With Renata's complex balance of intellectual skepticism, emotional fragility and street smarts, Schwartz continues to show herself a rigorous novelist. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Schwartz describes the emotional flavor of the days after 9/11 with great clarity....But it all bogs down in backstory....A valiant effort, but Schwartz doesn't quite pull it off." Kirkus Reviews

"Schwartz is a connoisseur of anguish, especially survivor's guilt, yet she is also an adept choreographer of romance." Booklist (starred review)

Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of fourteen books, including Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award); In the Family Way; Ruined by Reading; and most recently, Referred Pain. She lives in New York City.