Feeding Christine

In the midst of Teresa DiRosa's frantic preparations for the annual holiday party thrown by her catering company, Bread and Roses, her niece, Christine, appears, threatening suicide. Exasperated, Teresa bonks Christine over the head with a frying pan (""not the cast iron... just an old Teflon""), drags her down to the cellar, ties her securely and resumes cooking for the party with her co-workers. Except for a brief resolution, this sums up the action in Chepaitis's overly sentimental, humorless novel. The rest is back-story, memories and exposition as Teresa and her colleagues, Delia and Amberlin, peel carrots and discuss how to cope with the madwoman in the basement. But it's not just Christine who's struggling with bleakness and depression: for the first time ever, Teresa's college-age son isn't coming home for the annual party, and she's reminded of her failures as a mother and as a wife. And uniting Teresa to her niece is the haunting despair concerning Nan, Teresa's sister and Christine's mother, an alcoholic who committed suicide seven years ago. Teresa claims to be fiercely protective of Christine's life (""And I won't I won't I won't let her die""), but with the action confined largely to one room and relying heavily on one character's memories, no one in the melodrama ever gets out and lives with any urgency. Teresa's romance with a shy widower and Christine's unhappy relationship with her psychiatrist fianc seem like rote devices to flesh out these characters by giving them outside lives, but the author misses a chance to reveal their inner lives by choosing to focus on the recurrent themes of food and cooking. Throughout, the four main characters serve up an inconsistent m lange of irrelevant memories while the plot flows as sluggishly as molasses. (July)