MIDDLE AGE A Romance

Oates, one of our most noted scholar-novelists, has a taste for genre fiction, especially the gothic. By calling this stylish story a Romance, she warns the reader that she's in one of those moods. She sets up her tale in a suburban pocket of privilege called Salt Hill, where a bachelor-about-town, who may or may not have been named Adam Berendt, and who seems to have been attractive to practically everyone in the village, dies in a misadventure in the first chapter. How this event affects everyone who knew, or thought she knew him, constitutes the tale. Mary Peiffer reads with an inappropriate lilt, and little apparent understanding of the words coming out of the author's narrative. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 02]