A Place at the Table

A gentle, clear-eyed honesty distinguishes this coming-of-middle-age novel by the author of Allegra Maud Goldman. Rachel Levin is a divorced novelist of mid-list success who lives in Manhattan, where she has a small circle of intimate friends and a lover, a young woman lawyer, with whom she's about to break up. In the quiet course of the unstructured, episodic story, Rachel writes a ``treatment'' for a story packager and begins a new novel. She suffers when her friend Margo is left by her husband; she visits one of her sons on the birth of his first child, breaks off with her lover, and undergoes--too abruptly--a mastectomy, all the while remembering bits and pieces of her life. At tale's end she meets another friend, a writer turned bag-lady, on a subway and has a final conversation that is both utterly natural and redeeming. Rachel is a thoroughly recognizable human being, compassionate, cruel, self-absorbed and a true friend. Her story unfolds as a life does; that is the novel's achievement and its failing. (May)