Almost perfect.

St. Andrews, B.A.

Stella Blake meets Richard Fallon at the confluence of certain forces, at the moment of change. She struggles with her rocky emotional past and with a lackluster job writing interviews for a San Francisco newspaper. He moves effortlessly, exudes self-assurance, and has a certain marketable genius (self-proclaimed) as a commercial artist. Both of them are handsome, talented, admired, and in love: nearly perfect. But Alice Adams has studied her historical moment far too long to serve up a nicely seasoned portion of the romantic illusion. Instead, she offers Almost Perfect, an oddly affecting morality tale that tastes like good medicine with no more than the requisite spoonful of darkly humorous sugar.

Throughout her twelve works of fiction--including such notables as Rich Rewards, Caroline's Daughters, Second Chances, and Beautiful Girl--Adams has chronicled the tangled skein called the "new family," the postmodern product of a rich and robust sexual (if not emotional) history. Almost Perfect continues her investigations and contains all the celebrated components of her best writing: a San Francisco vibrant with characters and a character all its own; the interior monologues of people caught in moments of apprehension and amazement; the doomed attempts to share communion without the requisite purification, the requisite self-sacrifice.

The social rites recorded in Almost Perfect observe the laws of nature--of human nature at least. As Stella's star rises (and whether or not Adams's pun on the name is intentional), her lover's sun sets. Richard's descent happens dramatically; he falls first into the darkness of manic-depressive behaviors and later into full-blown psychotic depression. His early emotional interest in Stella convolutes into a paranoid suspicion of her and of all women as the chasm of his own very real insanity opens at his feet and widens. Devoured by his libidinous appetites and professional failures, Richard and his courtship rituals--even early on partly charming and partly chilling--devolve into frightening and endangering behaviors. He becomes obsessed with bashing homosexuals while behaving with a casual cruelty that contaminates the heterosexual alternative. For example, in this age of AIDS, Richard knowingly sleeps with the infected Andrew Bacci and, in turn, endangers his multiple female partners.

If Almost Perfect examines excesses in drinking, in lusting, in satisfying the lower appetites, it also inventories the consequences. At best, everything is only almost perfect, but at worst only almost totally flawed. Surviving her two-year involvement with Richard and gaining increasing recognition for her work, Stella finally faces the new facts of life: "Richard is crazy. It is not her craziness. So often he has said to her, You're crazy, that she has come at least half to believe him." By novel's end, her old wounds from a self-absorbed father and a dictatorial lover, Liam O'Gara, close over, and even those inflicted by Richard, to a reasonable extent, heal.

Stella grows; Richard shrivels. Adams tries to reassure us that this lopsided equation may find explanation in his mental imbalance. Sad as this conclusion seems, it is more acceptable than coming to terms with inferences that the new man may not have the emotional capacity to embrace his female equal with as passionate a recognition of her successes as he once had of her limitations. Without being simplistic, Adams seems to suggest that lovers in this complicated modern moment choose sensation over emotion.

On one level, Adams's entire opus seems interested in charting the frightening mobility of the modern emotional landscape: the old solid moral ground of lifelong love and commitment has suffered upheaval. In Stella Blake, Adams tries to gauge the sexual heat and social pressures that metamorphose the modern woman and, perforce, the contemporary man. Much of this ado, however, involves heat without light, as Almost Perfect traces characters trapped in superficialities: their withering good looks, their sexual scorecards, their flashing social successes. Loyalty, kindness, and moral courage are forgotten virtues in this sophisticated circle of artists and socialites; few of them seem capable of good conduct. In Almost Perfect Alice Adams records lives far removed from the cherished old beliefs in the perfectibility of man--or of woman, for that matter.

B. A. St. Andrews SUNY Health Science University, Syracuse