| In her third and finest novel, the author of Mrs.Beneker and A Loving Wife gives us a charming andmoving (and unself-righteous) portrait of that muchmaligned woman, the middle-class, middle-aged liberal lady, trying to understand her "now generation"children through her memory of her own "political"past. Jo (Mrs. Ben Baer) is the nice New York ladyyou ve seen lunching at the Plaza, browsing at Brcn-tano s and Doubleday s, choosing lamb chops inD Agostino s-and tutoring ghetto boys, and takingpart in the candlelight vigil for peace in front of St.Patrick s. She has been called an egghead, a bleedingheart, a Comsymp, but what she is is a woman of feeling whose heart is as touched by headlines as it is by her own children. Jo s own two children now fill her heart with con- fusion and fear. They belong to the generation that lives in chaotic shim pads, that scorns material things, that doesn t marry (or feels guilty if it does), that nervously contemplates adopting an American In- dian-or should it be hlack?-baby, that cngages full- time in protest, that vanishes from sight or hearing for months at a time. And when her son finds himself on the fringes of serious political trouble, Jo, in ter- ror, relives her own soul-scarching time: the days when she herself was called beforc a Congrcssional committee-an ordeal from which she is just now, awhole generation later, beginning to recover. How she comes to terms with her children, herfears, and her confusions is told in A Woman ofFeeling. Among its many pleasures: an intelligentand lovable heroine and, perhaps for the first time,an essential sensibility defined-in a novel that ex-plores, seriously and with grace, the relationshipbetween parents and grown children today. |
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