'Heroic Measures' by Jill Ciment

Then Dorothy collapses, and the couple rushes her uptown to the animal hospital, only to find the city in the grip of terror. A gasoline truck has jackknifed in the Midtown Tunnel, blocking incoming traffic. Did the driver, who has disappeared, lose control of his rig, or is this another terrorist attack? Over the weekend that follows, Dorothy undergoes surgery, the truck driver hijacks a taxi and a bidding war on Ruth and Alex's apartment ensues.

All of this, in Ciment's controlled, economical prose, becomes incredibly suspenseful, due in no small part to the mundane difficulties Alex and Ruth face in their day-to-day life, navigating an economy and technocracy they barely understand. Threat is everywhere, from the "cell phone with two years' worth of flashing messages (neither . . . know how to retrieve the messages)," to the remote control that Alex fears, as one wrong move might deprogram the cable box, to the wealthy, emboldened youngsters who traipse through their apartment during the open house, lying down on their bed and assessing the view.

That view is nothing much to speak of -- smokestacks, a patch of sky -- but Ruth has long loved it. As the strangers take it in, assessing its market value, Ruth finds herself, uncharacteristically, worrying that they won't find it worthy. And this worry instigates a process of self-questioning that leads her to places she never thought she would go. By the novel's end, exhausted by the activities of the weekend, she has lost one of the thick lenses she's worn since childhood. Putting on her broken glasses, she finds that "rather than one eye of clarity, she gets two eyes of disorientation." It's a lovely moment, heartbreaking in its accuracy, but also an apt metaphor for the ways in which Ruth has changed. Her vision of both the world and her place in it has irrevocably shifted. She was right: Old age, it turns out, is not about stability, after all.

Still, that almost final moment, as she surveys the world without depth perception, refers back to a luminous passage in the novel's opening chapters, when Ruth recalls being given her first pair of glasses, at age 9. "When she . . . looked out the optician's window," Ciment writes, "she saw that the foaming horse harnessed to a rag wagon, the beggar picking up cigarette butts, the beat cop, the newspaper boy fanning himself with headlines, the men waiting in line for soup, the blur of humanity at the nadir of the Depression, was actually made up of individual faces, each face, including the horse's, expressing such blatant defeat or rage or worry or hunger or bewilderment that Ruth felt as if she had caught them at their most private moments."

The clarity and poignancy of that passage is particularly intense, in a novel filled with many similar moments. But it also suggests a metaphor for the way "Heroic Measures" itself functions: as a lens through which Ciment enables us to penetrate the innermost thoughts of her characters, in all their fragility and tenacity, and in so doing to feel, like the young Ruth, "the first stirring of compassion."

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Rakoff is the author of the novel "A Fortunate Age."