Ordinary People was no fluke: [Guest's second novel Second Heaven] again expertly catches middle-class loners in the first crackles of seismic rebellion against closet miseries—and again zooms in close on adolescent terror. The principal grownups this time [Catherine "Cat" Holzman and lawyer Michael Atwood] are two insular people, both recovering (with each other's eventual help) from divorce…. Cat and Michael still remain only mildly, distantly connected … until one night 16-year-old Gale Murray, fainting and seriously burned, arrives at Cat's door: abused since infancy by a maniacal, religious-fanatic father …, Gale has been irrevocably alone…. Understandably, then, both Cat and Michael are drawn into Gale's strangulated life—as Cat gives him a temporary home and Michael becomes his lawyer. (Placed in a juvenile detention center, Gale awaits trial for "incorrigibility.") And after more anguish and savagery for poor, uncommunicative Gale, all three isolated, ordinary people will be liberated, will...