by Amity Gaige.

Other Press. 300 pages. $23.95.

BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL
Special to the Journal

From the first, Charlie Shade was charmed, his golden hair an appropriate metaphor for the kind of guy he was. Midwestern, disarming, and utterly earnest, “he loved to be surprised, for such was the immunity to horror that results from a completely happy and cloistered childhood.”

The Folded World is an artfully-rendered portrait of Charlie and his wife, a meditation on love, relationships and responsibility, and an exploration of what exactly constitutes the dividing line between sanity and madness. With this novel, Amity Gaige, a Brown graduate and creative writing teacher at the University of Rhode Island and Mount Holyoke, follows up on her widely acclaimed novel O My Darling, which garnered her a spot on the National Book Foundation’s debut “5 Under 35” list last year.

Longing for a taste of humanity’s gritty underbelly, seeking to feel that he “morally approved of his own life,” Charlie packed his bags after college and moved east to become a social worker. It was in his new home that he met the underachieving and bookish Alice. Daughter of a lonely and superstitious mother, Alice had moved to the city to escape the suffocation of the small working-class seaside town of her childhood. “Some people are born again by God. Charlie and Alice Shade were born again by one another.”

But their relationship, charmed again by the birth of twin daughters, is tested by Charlie’s all-consuming work on a mobile treatment team. His long hours leave Alice, struggling to be a first-time mother to the infant girls, feeling isolated and abandoned.

Meanwhile, his job brings him into close orbit with the lives of those who have been set adrift by their own minds into sometimes quirky and sometimes dangerous territory. Appropriate professional boundaries are all but impossible for the naively optimistic Charlie, and as he begins to get into risky situations at work, the story steamrolls to a place where his troubles at work and at home collide.

The character of Charlie is a particularly compelling one. Although Gaige professes no experience as a social worker, the often-awkward (and sometimes wrenching) dance of the care provider who must know people intimately, yet simultaneously keep them at arm’s length — provide “detached concern,” in medicine-speak — is portrayed here to stunning effect. The love between Charlie and Alice is sweet and real without being cloying, and Alice’s relationship with her mother is satisfyingly complicated.

Gaige was a playwright before she was a novelist, and that experience is in evidence with the precision of the language and the pace of the story. But the beauty of her prose and her joy in wordsmithing suggest that The Folded World might just as readily have been written by a poet.