The Dangerous Age

In this short chronicle of midlife crisis and divorce, Jaffee (Recent History) tells what a quarter-century of marriage may do to a woman's love life and her self-esteem. Suzanne Miller, a Chicago feminist scholar and teacher of fairy tales, wakes up one morning with the feeling that ""everything she had imagined was completed."" Her marriage to a successful law professor and her two grown children provide little comfort. Moreover, several of her friends are divorced or dying, and she herself soon must undergo a hysterectomy. When she meets Robert Parrish--an athletic, older banker with three daughters and a chilly wife--Suzanne leaves her husband and buys a house in the country, which she shares with Robert. Sexual passion provides Suzanne's great awakening; she ""becomes a woman."" Yet her sudden emancipation feels like a put-on: she calls her boyfriend ""Daddy"" and lets him order for her in restaurants; he addresses her exclusively as ""honey"" and ""baby,"" as if he has forgotten her name. Although the prose is careful and precise and Suzanne's predicament well rendered, the protagonist's self-critical yearning for lost childhood grows tedious and fails to give a fresh dimension to this familiar plot. (Jan.)