NEW YORK -- A decade ago, Galaxy Craze was a rising starlet who turned her back on movies to write "By the Shore," a coming-of-age novel about two children in 1970s England. The book was greeted with acclaim -- reviews and profiles featured a winsome photograph of the then-28-year-old, alongside rapturous descriptions of her work.
Then, Craze seemed to disappear. She married, had two children and began a second novel, which she struggled to write.
That novel, "Tiger, Tiger," was finally published last month. It picks up, several years later, the main characters from "By the Shore": The narrator, May, is now a teenage girl. May's mother, as flighty as she was in the first novel, has left her husband and taken her children to an ashram near Los Angeles. The time is the 1980s, although it is only halfway through the book that cultural references make this clear. It is a deceptively slight, simple, haunting story, a meditation on a disintegrating family.
During a recent heat wave in New York, Craze, who is visiting from Massachusetts, finds herself with her 10-week-old daughter at Angelica's Kitchen, a vegetarian restaurant in the East Village that she frequented when she lived in the city.
"Don't worry," she says, pointing to her daughter. "She's usually pretty cooperative."
In much the same style as her two books, Craze can be funny in a deadpan and self-deprecating way. "I know I shouldn't be disparaging myself," she says about the years she spent trying to write "Tiger, Tiger," "but I'm not joking. I'm not trying to be like a pretty girl who says, 'Oh, I'm so ugly!'
"Everyone said a second book is really hard," she continues. "At first I was trying a whole new voice, and it wasn't me. Right before I got married, I handed my editor a complete 380-page manuscript. She wrote back with a few edits and I threw it all away and started over again. I did that twice. That's why it took eight years."
Craze's editor is Elisabeth Schmitz, the executive editor at Grove/Atlantic who discovered Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain." She signed Craze to a two-book deal in 1999. "I remember feeling so confident about her gift as a writer," Schmitz recalls, "that I bought two books even though there wasn't a word to read of the second -- I was too curious to know what she would do next." What drew her to the work, Schmitz adds, is that "she has this unique ability to be lyrical and lovely and also surprisingly suspenseful."
