The Difference

Goodwin (While the Music Lasts) delivers an intelligent character study concerned with choices of the heart. Her portrait of Eleanor Nelson is elegiac, restrained and smoldering with repressed English emotion. Eleanor emerges into womanhood after a lonely, motherless upbringing as the neglected daughter of emotionally distant mogul Walter Nelson, American founder of a London-based advertising agency. Trapped in a loveless marriage to solemn, decent diplomat Hugo Lawrence, Eleanor, the mother of four-year-old Joanna, is swept by Hugo's career to Brazil, where she is reunited with her ``actressy,'' histrionic mother, Sara, who abandoned her as a child to elope with a sinister Brazilian businessman. She also begins a tempestuous affair with elegant playboy Francisco De Quiroz that has life-changing consequences. Played out against the glamorous backdrop of the upper echelons of British and Brazilian society, politics and business from the 1970s to the present, the novel nonetheless remains sharply focused on Eleanor's inner state. She proves an absorbing character whose marital problems have the ring of truth. (Aug.)