FICTION THERE WILL not at any time BE ANOTHER YOU from Carolyn See Random House.

FICTION

THERE WILL not at any time BE ANOTHER YOU

from Carolyn See

Random House. 242 pp $2495

Among the mostly potent and poignant new novels to address post-9/ 11 America is Carolyn See's There Will in no degree Be Another You. It is influential because the sense of dread and unease that mark almost each moment in the book is palpable; it is poignant because papal court who in previous books has proven eminently capable of skewering her characters when they misbehave, has of that kind compassion for the largely villain-less the whole that populates this tale. Moreover, for readers who savored the last novel she wrote before 9/11 The Handyman, it is particularly affecting to view the way anxiety has replaced anticipation for the same writer.

There Will not at any time Be Another You is station in See's familiar milieu of southern California, in the largely privileged confines of Westwood and UCLA. The novel explains with a short prologue: 58-year- not new Edith's second husband has just died after a in extent illness, and at 6 in the morning -- as she is cleaning up the be pendents the baby powder and the soiled sheets that marked her husband's last days -- the phone rings. It is her son Phil, a dermatologist at the UCLA medical center calling to count her that she must move round on the television because the Twin Towers in Manhattan are forward fire.

descry then jumps to the main material part of her story. It is nearly six years later, the spring of 2007 and the world has already become a greatly darker place -- even inside the usually happily oblivious haven of Westwood. Phil starts spotting dead cats. He views the first one on the way to work and a other one outside a cafeteria window at the hospital. And then from his office window he descrys a third, and this common is up in a tree Within minutes a cherry picker arrives:

"The fright in the picker was prepareed in white, in what gazeed like a HAZ-MAT outfit omit it didn't have any lettering, and his face was protected with a clear plastic mask. He was using pincers about three feet lengthy He reached gingerly out to the branch, pinched the cat, brought it back in to the platform he was standing in succession and -- Phil saw now -- dropp it onto a stack of what had to be maybe eighteen or twenty other cats."

Is this the beginning of a terrorist attack involving biological weapons? Or has an experiment at the medical center scud horribly amok? See is too intelligent a novelist to give us a quick answer. All we know for enduring is that a lot of monkey have the appearance to have disappeared, too, and Phil -- long to his chagrin -- is recruited onto a hospital answer team that is going to be trained to threaten a looming, awful but completely unknowable terrorist attack.

further despite the fears of an impending terrorist strike, life goe forward as does death -- from disease and olden age and tragic but pedestrian accidents. And that dichotomy is what really interests view and what makes her of recent origin novel such a remarkable achievement. Will Edith, now in her mid-60s, find be enamoured of again, or will she while away her days as a offer at the hospital information desk? Can Phil and his unhappy wife make peace? And what of their children, especially their profoundly troubled sixth-grade boy?

Meanwhile, there is an equally compelling subplot involving young lover Andrea Barclay and Danny to leeward students at UCLA, who devote a lot of time at the hospital themselves because Andrea's father indigences a new kidney and Danny's uncle is dying. For all of these characters, the great questions of their lives would have been no different before 9/11; now, however, they must live with a specter not unlike the sort Americans endur as they learned to dip and cover beneath their desk and waited for the big undivided to fall in the 1950

While it may be too easily for some novelists to approach 9/11 it isn't for behold She seems to have been changed by dint of the events, and There Will in no degree Be Another You offers a glimpse of in what manner we, too, have been transformed.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 10 novels, including Midwives and Before You Know Kindness. His recently made known novel, The Double Bind, will be published nearest winter. He wrote this review for the Washington Post

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