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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Where do the dead go? Prudence Winship, the heroine of Emily Barton's beautiful second novel, "Brookland" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $25), decided around the age of six that she had the answer. The year was 1778. Prue lived in Brooklyn, where her father owned a gin distillery. She was an only child, and dark-minded. But in those days, as she tells us, looking back on her youth, you didn't have to have a morbid cast of mind to think about death. For years, British soldiers, affable boys, had been camped in Brooklyn; they vanished daily. Fevers swept through the village, taking mothers, children. "It seemed," Prue says, "I saw the dead as often as I saw the living . . . their hands slack, their skin oaty as dishwater." The young Prue's recreation is to sit on the bluff below her father's distillery and think about this. She looks at the big East River and at the island on the other side, Manhattan. And slowly it dawns on her. The inhabitants of that island are crowded; unlike Brooklynites, they live stacked up in three- and four-story buildings. Every day, barges leave Brooklyn to bring them food and drink. These people have insatiable hungers, as Prue has heard is the case with the damned. So that's the answer. When you die, you go to Manhattan.
Soon after this epiphany, Prue's mother becomes pregnant, and Prue, who wants no rivals, begs God to kill the child. The baby is born, but with a defect in her vocal cords. "She could emit no sound but a rasping sigh, such as a person makes choking on a fishbone"--a condition that Prue is sure she caused by her...
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