Women Like Us CL

Smart, snappy and compulsively readable, Abeel's first novel (her columns were collected in I'll Call You Tomorrow ) traces the lives of four women in the class of 1958 at Sarah Lawrence College through three decades of social upheaval and personal angst. The four consider themselves rebels at college because they plan to ignore the prevalent '50s attitude that a woman is fulfilled only through marriage. Though each covets a career in the arts, they unconsciously define themselves mainly through their amorous encounters and search for permanent relationships. Delphine, the flamboyant leader of the group, is the first to be betrayed by sexual longing; she marries early, to a self-obsessed architect, and later turns down her dream job as editor-in-chief of a publishing company to follow her husband to Texas. Daisy abandons her plan to be a dancer in favor of writing a novel, but mistakes in love and the need to earn a living and support her children thwart her ambitions. Franca chooses marriage over other options twice, stealing the man who loves Daisy in the process. Ironically, the least talented of them, mouselike, insecure Ginny Goldberg, remakes herself as Gina Gold and becomes a TV celebrity. This silent generation are ``the casualties of history'': having predated the feminist revolution, some of them later buy the promises of women's lib, falling out of marriage into poverty and complete dislocation. Writing with wit and perception, Abeel makes her characters' parallel lives an absorbing saga of heartaches and successes (though she earns shock value at the expense of credibility when some events slide into melodrama.) (Feb.)