In Every Woman's Life

Although Shulman (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, etc.) turns some able phrases and makes valid points about the duplicities of matrimony and the constraints facing ""liberated'' women despite the advances of the women's movement, her tale is arch and self-conscious. Rosemary Streeter, a smug, self-deluding ``dutiful wife,'' compartmentalizes her career, husband, children and lover. Not surprisingly, she believes that ``marriage is about family. It's about raising children. It's an economic arrangement. Passion has nothing to do with it, except maybe to get it started.'' Unmarried, childless and fiercely independent, Nora Kennedy, a beautiful and dashing journalist, ``relishes her clean uncluttered life'' yet yearns to live with her lover, who, alas, is married to someone else. Rosemary's daughter, Daisy, is apparently Shulman's hope for the future, the woman who doesn't ``settle for less than all''although her metamorphosis from a lovesick, rather witless teenager into a wise woman is abrupt. If men are as pitiably weak and if relations between the sexes are as bleak as Shulman paints them, readers won't want to dwell on the miseries pervading these cloying stereotypes. (June 1)