When Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth

At the novel's center, the Geblers:. Dolly, patron of the arts, Midwestern heiress to a great pharmaceutical fortune, raised among her father's Flemish Masters and abstract expressionists. She is dedicated to the idea that art can change the world. Alfred, her husband, a poor boy from Brooklyn, a good Joe (he thinks), a man with the soul of a seventeen-year-old (she thinks), who feels he should have been a jazz musician, who loves nightclubs and tequila, who believes he has married a woman with no concept of companionship, a woman for whom everything is appearances - black-tie galas and special viewings six nights a week, AIDS benefits, board meetings. Together (with her money) they are the Aurora Foundation - a renovated parochial school turned into forty thousand square feet of metal and glass tile amidst a burnt-out flatland of Lower East Side tenements. Its purpose: to choose a few men and women of genius, bank them for life, and give them enough rope to hang the world. Into their high orbit comes Isaac Hooker, twenty-five years old, a wunderkind from New Hampshire, a wild soul, Harvard-educated, but with no direction, no plans. Isaac is new to the big city of New York, working