The Girls

First-novelist Kagan is literate and intelligent, but her attempt at commercial fiction leaves a lot to be desired. The six ``girls'' who grew up together in Kansas City are now in their 50s, but they and their former boyfriends and current husbands have remained closely knit. When Jessie Chickery shoots her flagrantly womanizing husband Pete, each of the ``girls'' relates her version of the event, which entails recounting memories of their shared pasts in minute and often irrelevant detail. A thread through their stories is their secret relationships with Pete, who is variously depicted as cold and manipulative or caring and generous, having seduced and cruelly dropped some of the ``girls'' but made others feel loved, beautiful and needed. Kagan's attempt to delineate Pete's complicated personality via each character's first-person narration results in long monologues that sustain a note of histrionic self-indulgence. Though she tries to vary their voices, the women all sound alike, speaking in identical repetitive phrases and short, choppy sentences. One character says: ``I was drunk. I was.'' Another emotes: ``I can't do this. I just can't.'' A third: ``I knew I was alive. Alive for the first time.'' There is a sameness to their lives, too: they have all been sad and desperate and have had serious emotional breakdowns. A ridiculously melodramatic funeral scene seems written for a TV movie. 50,000 first printing; Literary Guild alternate. (May)