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by Richard P. Brickner

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"Alan Hoffman is 40 and unmarried, a writer for a New York newsweekly, and an addict of the most tony metropolitan entertainments: he attends three or four opera performances a week during the season (as many concerts, too), and his collection of ticket stubs, all saved, is legendary. Importunate, impatient, voluptuously egotistical and brusque, Alan has found in opera a stylization of what, in life, he finds least bearable--the sheer time it takes for life and love to conspire. Then, in the show more Met lobby one night, he meets a lawyer he once interviewed, and the lawyer's wife: Betsy Ring--who turns out to be Alan's complement, an Iphigenia in Limbo, bright and yet perfectly, gracefully confused, swinging from on high during the period of doubt marked by the upcoming publication of her first novel and the postponed beginning of her second. Their affair starts as a stutter, and Brickner sets down the physical shyness and hesitancy perfectly. And then, suddenly--pure opera--the lawyer husband dies of a coronary . . . which leaves the nervous lovers with even greater guilt and even greater edginess.."--Kirkus. show less