That's Randall Roberts talking, with laserlike vision and a voice as biting as a snap of a whip. He's talking about his father, a successful psychiatrist burdened by the masochistic tendencies of a Jesus Christ complex. About his mother, whose obsession with social status and appearance has transformed a family's love into obligation. About his married sister, Sonny, struggling with the travails of marriage, and his other sister, Yolanda, a.k.a. Yogi, out to give a new definition to rebellion.

And, of course, he's talking about his own twelve-year-old self, an introvert on the verge of giving in to violent impulses.

Lionel Newton's first novel, Getting Right with God, established him as one of the most exciting new voices in fiction. Now he extends and enhances that distinction with this absorbing novel about the disintegration of a black middle-class family within the sweet serenity of suburban Long Island. This deterioration begins when the father, deeply troubled and increasingly disoriented, isolates himself in the library to write obscure religious commentary.

As a secretive relationship between father and son sets off a chain reaction of mistrust and adultery, the antisocial Randall gets a foretaste of the treachery of the adult world, and learns the painful lesson that love can be beautiful yet unenduring. Ultimately, he has to survive a shattering act of human sacrifice that kills what he loves most and brands him with guilt he can never expunge.

1. Scathingly funny and heartbreakingly real, totally unsentimental yet deeply moving, Things to Be Lost is wired with the on-the-edge rhythms of today in counterpoint with the age-old pulsing of the human heart. It is a triumph of African-American authenticity and literary artistry.