Along the border between passion and obsession.(Orpheus Lost)(Book review)

Janette Turner Hospital. Orpheus Lost. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007. 358 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-393-06552-7.

Throughout her work, Janette Turner Hospital pays great attention to the ever-shifting borders--be they ideological, interpersonal, geographic, or metaphysic--that both define and blur our sense of identity and home. Through her characters she explores the lengths to which the human animal will go to transcend or transgress both real and imagined boundaries. In Orpheus Lost, her eighth novel, she continues this project, broadening that liminal space created by 9/11 explored so deftly in Due Preparations for the Plague (W.W. Norton, 2003) into a near-future land/mindscape slightly hyperbolized but eerily similar to our own. At once a love story that updates and modifies the mythic tale incorporated in its title, a thriller that interrogates political and personal ideologies, as well as the attendant paranoia, …