I think that Alice Adams is quite underrated. Her books are highly readable and have a sort of airy, weightless quality about them, but they have a real sureness and incisiveness about them, too. They make me think of French pastries, quick to eat but hard to make. This book wasn't my favorite of hers - I guess that that would be Superior Women - but it was still pretty diverting and good. My favorite part about it was the dysfunctional California family that the heroine falls into. I could have cared less, on the other hand, about Jean Paul (I think that is his name), the long-lost French lover with whom the heroine is eventually (spoiler) reunited. To me, he is just too much of a familiar fantasy figure to be finally very convincingly sexy, and he seems kind of ghostly and vaporous even when he does eventually turn up again in the heroine's life. One thing that I think Adams does really well, and I can't quite figure out how she does it, is to draw her characters in these very bold, deft, offhand strokes, while also somehow giving them plenty of unpredictable human dimensions. They seem like sketches, outlines, yet at the same time they seem like real people. (With the exception of Jean Paul, who never seems like anything but a sketch.) For example, the pretty blond California socialite in this novel who turns out to have one personality around straight men, and another (much more winning and competent) personality around other women and gay men. That was a sharp little moment that I appreciated, and it's done so effortlessly. I much prefer Alice Adams the social observer to Alice Adams the writer of love stories.
