Some Girls

Her first novel, the highly erotic Velocity , established McCloy as a gifted writer unafraid to take risks. Here she confirms her gifts in an assured, tightly honed narrative that explores another kind of eroticism: that of sexual attraction between women. Her heroine, unsophisticated Claire Stearn from Alamogordo, N.M., comes to New York, determined to satisfy her inchoate restlessness. Claire is alternately enchanted and repelled by the big city, just as she is alternately drawn to and frightened by Jade, her apartment neighbor in TriBeCa. Exquisitely glamorous, cynical, reckless, enigmatic and seductive, Jade introduces Claire to her bisexual friends and the seedy bars and clubs they frequent. In contrast, when Claire's stalwart rancher boyfriend comes to New York, the familiar tourist attractions seem tame. Claire is devastated by guilt after Jade lures her to bed, and Jade decamps to Europe where she picks up a macho photojournalist. McCloy sustains the suspense in this narrative with taut precision, keeping Claire on a tightrope of conflicting emotions, the two women in a seesawing relationship and the reader totally engrossed in her story. Meanwhile, she offers a lively Baedecker to New York, depicting its varied neighborhoods and often louche inhabitants in prose at once graphic and lyrical. Though she creates an unrealistically ideal relationship between Claire and her attorney employer, in the end McCloy's deft juxtaposition of gritty realism with the euphoria of sexual passion makes a powerful and consistently intriguing narrative. QPB selection. (Aug.)