HIGH STRUNG

After 10 years in London copyediting porn novels, a weary 32-year-old American returns to her Ohio hometown in Dalton's breezy first novel. All the important plot elements are revealed in the first few pages of the snappily paced first-person narrative: Merle Winslow has left her strange, sexual role–playing English boyfriend, Terence, and her vaguely sketched life back in England to come home to the truncated family outside of Cleveland that she had fled a decade before. Merle's father, widowed after her alcoholic mother died with her lover in a car accident when Merle was 12, plans to marry again, while Merle's younger single brother, Olin, is floundering in his career after an early windfall invention (a Marilyn Monroe barbecue thermometer). The drama of their parents' swift Oklahoma courtship and marriage still haunts Merle, as does the 1970 student bombing of a local Ohio college building; her mother had been photographed there (while pushing Merle in a stroller) and consequently labeled a subversive. Merle claims she has returned because she is "tired of being alone in the world," but she and her family and friends don't seem to have missed each other much—or to be able to express it if they did. Merle is a plucky, chin-up character who wittily tempers her self-pity, yet the novel relies too much on small exchanges, the narrative pinched within the limited scope that short story writer Dalton allows it. (July)