Hands and Straight Lines

<p>In an unspecified time and place in America teenaged Edward Rawlinson paints watercolors watches his older brother Burke romance pretty horse-riding Christine and retreats into his visual adoration of bicycle reflectors Victorian picture frames linen tablecloths and heftily built men. As Ed matures his ability to lose himself in the sensual fractalesque aspects of everyday life -including hazelnuts antique fans and doorbells-will lead him to a happy tender relationship and life of security with Lawrence an aging professor but also to an avoidant labyrinthine relationship with the practical world of straight lines. With its strange slow-paced portrait of a young man quietly determined to engage with society on his own terms Carla Bradsher-Fredrick's <em>Hands and Straight Lines</em> creates a calm yet unsettling zone of ambivalence that reconfigures the traditional <em>bildungsroman</em> into a mysterious meditation on adulthood and the good life. </p>