If This World Were Mine
   E. Lynn Harris
  1997 Doubleday NY USA
   ISBN: 0385486561


Friends from their college years, four Chicagoans face a year of change and tragedy, memories and a testing of their friendship.

This book kept coming into view on our library shelf, until I finally could not resist its entreaties to be taken home and read. And what a homecoming!

In If This World Were Mine, the title of a 1970s hit, the people are richly drawn, the times they remember and live in offer glimpses of big city and college life, often invisible because they don't make headlines. It's also set in a city which gave me seventeen good years - Chicago.

I've been a long-time journal writer so the format at the outset is dear to me, and reading the initial entries of the women and men, reminded me of encounter groups. And then the sloughing off of the layers, like make-up or onion skins until each real face shines out.

I related much more to Dwight's caged rage than either Riley's or Kelli's cheery chatter, although the cracks are all there. Dwight's first journal entry reminded me of my caged rage of being a woman in a man's world.

And then I met Leland and my heart was suddenly engaged, clenched with so much familiarity, so much unexpressed everyday courage and cerebral elegance.

I relished revisiting Chicago and its neighborhoods; I felt included, almost as a fifth member of the group, in the changes, adventures and outcomes of the next year in the lives of these friends.

I realize Mr. Harris has made magic, I'd fallen in love with each of his characters. And while he demurs that the stories dancing in his head are not tools to alter our lives, merely to change our hearts, I suggest Mr. Harris has done both. A lovely, deeply moving story of friends, their lives and what they mean to each other.
(04/12/99)

Rebecca