Mrs. Hornstein

When timid, 17-year-old Marty Fish's boyfriend, Albert Hornstien, takes her to meet his mother, Golda, Marty thinks she seems ""more like an apartment house or a bank or a department store than a regular woman.... There was something enormous about her."" Regal and overbearing in her palatial, gray satin-lined Philadelphia apartment, the formidable matriarch presides over her husband and two children with a grand and all-encompassing ruthlessness. ""Whatever the Boss Lady says!"" is the family's sarcastic refrain. After Albert announces his engagement to the socially inferior Marty, Golda goes to bed for a week. However, she then accepts defeat gracefully, and the two women eventually achieve a touching relationship. Told in Marty's understated but increasingly wise voice, the novella sparely yet evocatively limns the relationship between Mrs. Hornstien and her daughter-in-law across a span of 30 years, through tragedies and other life-shaping events. Though Golda is a tough old bird, she eventually becomes a figure of valor and pathos as she deals with her husband's illness and death and then her own failing health. Marty learns to love and respect her mother-in-law, calling her ""the real teacher of my life.'' Marty's own greedy and demanding mother, a monster of selfishness and cynicism, almost destroys her daughter's capacity for happiness. As Marty develops from a sad and insecure teenager into a woman who enjoys love and endures loss, Wagman (Playing House) demonstrates with a merciless eye the class differences between Marty's left-leaning Jewish-American family and the nouveau-riche Hornstiens. But she is compassionate in conveying the complicated emotions that bind a family. Her decision to sprinkle dialogue with capitalized words may irritate some readers, but this honest, humane and surprising book rises high above that flawed device. 75,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour. Rights: Harriet Wasserman Agency. (May)