A Place at the Table

Rachel Levin's life is seemingly falling apart--her lover has left her, a friend's marriage is failing, and she has surgery for breast cancer--but she somehow finds the strength to cope with it all

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.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This is an entertaining novel, set in New York City, about coming to terms with late middle age and all its erosions. Long divorced, with grown children, Rachel Levin sees her current lover (a young woman) drifting away, her friend's marriage crashing, and , worst of all, writer's block denying her the consolations of work. Using flashbacks, Konecky describes with ironic compassion a whole array of characters struggling with middle age a la middle class: Deirdre, talented and clever, drifing from eccentricty to madness; Margo, writing steamy-sex best sellers instead of literature; Lisa, ambivalent about sex, career, and identity; and Rachel's son, Henry, whose family turns the unconventional Rachel inexorably into a conventional mother-in-law in spite of her determined resistance. A funny, lively look at the upheavals that seem to be increasingly unavoidable rites of passage for us all.
- Ann Donovan, Central Washington Univ. Lib., Ellensburg
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.