Rich rewards

The New York Times Book Review has called Alice Adams a "consummately pleasing writer." and with the publication of her three novels, Careless Love, Families and Survivors, and Listening to Billie, and her book of stories Beautiful Girl, she has become one of the most admired and enjoyed writers at work today. Her new novel takes us into the life of a vital and elegant woman, Daphne Matthiessen - wry, intelligent, open to rich, and temporary unmoored. She fled a bad love affair in Boston and arrived in San Francisco, "that spoiled the lovely city." to decorate the house of her old school charm, Agatha. She's staying in Agatha's house meeting Agatha's friends, becoming-inadvertently if not unwillingly-involved in their lives, the sad unmarried man Agatha is seeing(a shock to Daphne), his dislocated children (one a sculptor, one an alcoholic who seems to her faintly manacling, faintly doomed), involvements that appear to presage something dark and unavoidable. And there are strange signs, portents, little suggestions that something is in the air. Suddenly she is veering toward it. Suddenly, through a story in the paper, Daphne finds herself moving toward the impossible, happy resolution of a lost love-"the great love of my so far foolish life"-as if a magic thread had been leading her untouched through a dangerous maze, drawing her on to an encounter, opening up past and present at once. Paris and herself, and him, 20 years before-and now. And so begins the marvelous unfolding of a piece of fate. "I was there for some purpose, which sometimes seemed to be a negative instruction. Do no go on as you are, it will lead to nothing good, you have to change." This is a novel that celebrates life's sly flexibility, the chances it provides for the intrepid and for those open to luck- chances of adventure, passion, wisdom, and love.