cover image Slightly Like Strangers

Slightly Like Strangers

Emily Listfield. Bantam Books, $19 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-553-34538-4

Admirers of Listfield's Variations in the Night will welcome the reappearance here of jaded native New Yorker Amanda and solid Midwesterner Sam, who both fear their emotions and, above all, the resulting vulnerability when these feelings are made known. Nevertheless, love inspires them to marry, although they preserve the tentative hope that they'll ``always be slightly like strangers to each other.'' Fashionable readers may enjoy the trendy Manhattan settings and the snappy dialogue`` `So now what do we do?' '' asks Sam on their wedding night. `` `Buy a condominium, have two children and get a divorce.' `That's fine for our long-range plans, but I was thinking about tonight.' '' Their easy career successes, the absence of all problems save the interpersonal, and the simplistic psychological studies of Amanda's and Sam's families have the patness of a made-for-TV movie, albeit a pleasant one. Despite Listfield's obvious mastery of the felicitous phrase and her wry observations, her story is thin and not particularly compelling. (Nov.)