LA FILLE DE L'AUTRE

If divorce rips a family apart, can a second marriage mend the tear, piecing the remnants together into one big Brady Bunch quilt? Of course not. In This Is My Daughter, New Yorkers Peter Chatfield and Emma Kirkland learn this the hard way. Roxana Robinson--whose dissection of WASP mores in Asking for Love and Summer Light earned her comparisons to such white-shoe masters as John Cheever, Edith Wharton, and Henry James--is on familiar ground here, placing Peter and Emma within the gilded cocoon of Manhattan's Upper East Side. Recently divorced, socially superior, and smarting from subhuman ex-spouses, the two have much in common, not least the desire to marry again. Emma's daughter, Tess, warms to the idea immediately. But for Peter's sullen seven-year-old, this union signals a disaster rather than a fresh "Amanda could not be happy that her father was marrying Emma.... She was already, at seven, in mourning for her life, for her past and happy life, that other world." Over the next eight years, Amanda's inability to deal with her father's remarriage, which the adults dismiss as mere adolescent angst, becomes a sizable thorn in the family's side. Despite all of Peter and Emma's best-laid plans--private schools, a picture-perfect summer home in New England, tennis clinics, invites to exclusive parties--Amanda grows increasingly alienated, and with one desperate act she forces the family to peel back their moneyed exterior and examine the heart of the matter. In This Is My Daughter, Robinson has created a skillful and sensitive portrayal of divorce and its post-nuclear-family fallout.