Llate Night Dancing

The lives and loves of three lonely, 40-ish L.A. women are traced from summer to winter in Silber's ( Confessions ) flashback-ridden second novel. Between lunches and heart-to-heart phone calls, they make professional progress and melodramatic personal compromises, striving for perfect happiness in a cliche-drenched singles scene. Cassie, staff doctor at an ob-gyn clinic, is mourning her husband's desertion of her for another women and coping with an empty nest as her daughter begins college. She embarks on a romance with her gardener, a psychologically scarred Vietnam vet. Previous marriages have left Cassie's best friend, Eve, a real estate broker, with an overabundance of memories that compound her fears as she faces a hysterectomy and begins a love relationship with a longtime friend. Beautiful, naive clotheshorse Nona's latest flame turns out to be a tabloid reporter; his scathing article exposes Nona's incestuous relationship with daddy. By the conclusion of this meandering story, all three are sadder but wiser, and, perhaps, even more alone, as their once-significant friendship has eroded. (Feb.)