Triplets

Another slick, fast-paced Hollywood novel by the author of Equal to Princes. Spurned by her true mother and brought up in a cold foster home, Diana Wyman marries into a wealthy old California family a few years before the stock market crash. She gives birth to triplets, but buries her love for Sara, Sky and their brother Vail, in a fanatical push toward individual perfection. When the two girls begin to compete as actresses, however, Diana nudges the less promising Sara aside and champions Sky's meteoric rise to the top during Hollywood's heyday. For Sara, single motherhood is a bittersweet coup, but at Diana's insistence she allows her daughter to be raised by Sky as the movie star's own. Vail, meantime, takes up a life of grimy abandon as a beatnik poet. Dragged along the road to fame on Sky's magic coattails, Vail and Sara finally find some measure of separate identities, one as a cutthroat film reviewer, the other as a minor film celebrity and rising young director in Italy. In trying to work up a high pitch of emotion, Gregory underpins a cast of rather weak characters with distressingly glib psychological motives. Fully half the book goes by before the joys and tragedies crammed into its many pages build up enough weight to resonate in a gratifying way, but eventually Gregory hits her stride and rewards the persevering reader. 75,000 first printing; $125,000 ad/promo. (April)