After Moondog

A first novel of uncommon grace and substance, this story about a marriage and its consequences marks the debut of an assured writer and chronicler of the contemporary scene. The knowing and ironic narrative spans 25 years, opening with a prologue in which narrator Joanne Green meets William, the man she will marry. It is 1965; they are both talking to Moondog, the New York street character who wore a Viking helmet and stood on the corner of 54th Street and the Avenue of the Americas for many years. Recalling the moment, Joanne says, ``I was 20 . . . still easily, routinely stunned by the beauty of the known world.'' The 17 chapters that follow work as connected but discrete stories that take Joanne and William from the chaos and concentrated anger of the Vietnam era to the cynicism and emptiness of the Reagan years. Out of a marriage built on ``supervening inordinate love'' come two appealing children and a suburban life supported by William's law practice. But infidelities poison the air, and a divorce becomes sadly inevitable. Shapiro captures the essence of nuanced family communications as well as that of life with teenage children, and her dialogue is frequently sidesplitting as well as deftly on the money. The particularly complicated resonance that can fill the relationships between married partners and their parents-in-law is hilariously done here, with Joanne's mother and William's father playing central roles in the family drama. But most important, Shapiro has created in Joanne Green a sympathetic narrator who offers appealing and unpretentious wisdom that is genuine and immediate; her nostalgia for what has been lost is the universal mourning for times past, for lives lived. (July)