"Away" demonstrates the epic reach of a mother's love

If all lives are journeys, and novels reflect life, then good novels are, we hope, journeys without life's boring parts. Amy Bloom's splendid new novel, "Away," is never boring. Based at least in part on a real woman's life, Bloom's story is a tale of the most powerful of loves — a mother's love for her child.

Lillian Leyb is fresh off the boat, one of thousands of European immigrants who enter America from New York's Ellis Island. It's 1924. Lillian is waiting outside the Goldfadn Theatre along with 150 other girls, hoping for a job as a seamstress. Lillian is a Russian Jew, staying with relatives. She is pretty, determined and forthright. She catches the eye of theater owner Reuben Burstein, known as the Impresario of Second Avenue, and his son, the handsome actor Meyer Burstein:

"The two men move through the crowd like gardeners inspecting the flower beds of English estates, like plantation owners on market day. Whatever it is like, Lillian doesn't care. She will be the flower, the slave, the pretty thing or the despised and necessary thing, as long as she is the thing chosen from among the other things." Lillian gets the sewing job and quite a bit more. She becomes the mistress of both men.

Reuben is old and married; Meyer is single and dashing. But Meyer's personal attractions lie elsewhere — in the dark shadows of Central Park. It's a complicated situation, but nothing Lillian can't handle.

Bloom re-creates this little pocket of New York Jewish life, both high and low, with sure, precise sentences:

"... the tea kettle whistles, and the three other night sleepers, the men in the parlor, get up and drink tea and eat bread in the kitchen until Lillian and Judith have dressed. There'd been four night sleepers, Judith and three men, which was not too bad, and now Lillian makes five, plus two more men, day sleepers who Judith sees only when they come in and lie down in the bed Judith and Lillian have just left."

At night, Lillian has nightmares, the same nightmare every evening. She relives in dreams the slaughtering of her family: the loss of her husband, her parents, and her little daughter Sophie.

Once Lillian takes on her role as mistress, she escapes tenement life. But her recent past continues to haunt her, until a cousin named Raisele turns up in her new apartment with astounding news: Sophie may be alive.

At that utterance, Bloom's novel goes from being a story about immigrant survival to a story of obsession. Determined to go to Siberia, where Sophie is reputed to be, Lillian begins a trip that will take her to Seattle, then deep into the Alaskan peninsula.

As one of our most accomplished short-story writers, Bloom has demonstrated time and again in her fiction how transformative this multidimensional emotion called love can be, shaping unlikely friendships, challenging whom we think people are. Bloom understands the complexity of human bonding. Her gift — beyond her ability to write interesting, surprising sentences — is to develop situations where people open up, often during moments of loss and tragedy, certainly in rough times, and create solutions to their desires and pain that aren't readily obvious.

This kind of midstream reversal of expectation is best shown in the short story form, but as "Away" moves out of New York, and the structure of the novel becomes more episodic, Bloom is able to introduce more unusual scenarios. From the Black and Tan Club in Seattle to the icy waters of the Dawson River, every person Lillian meets in some way moves her closer to her imagined reunion with her daughter, although the path is hardly the itinerary she had chosen.

Dogged in her pursuit, yet alive to the mysteries of human need, Lillian is the kind of hero we would like to think we could be, if we had the steel, if we had the heart.

Richard Wallace reviews fiction and theater for The Seattle Times.