Nobody's Girl

At 29, Birdy Stone is a restless spirit. Unmoored by her mother's death, her father's remarriage and her sister's estrangement, she has abruptly run out on her former fiance. Now she lives in a trailer in tiny Pinetop, N.M., where she teaches English literature to actively uninterested high-school seniors and hangs out, smokes dope and shoplifts with her gay colleague and pal, Jesus Morales. Birdy seems determined to avoid the responsibilities of adulthood; she lives vicariously through the characters in novels, whose lives have a coherence lacking in her own aimless existence. Her wisecracking personality fails to disguise the sadness that keeps her an outsider even to her own needs. When eccentric widow Isadora Anthony asks for Birdy's help in writing a spiritually uplifting memoir about the strange deaths of her daughter and her husband, Birdy agrees, mainly because she is sexually attracted to Isadora's son Mark, one of her students. Their torrid affair and Birdy's determination to discover the truth about the two deaths, which both occurred at ancient Anasazi ruins in the cliffs above the town, constitute the action in this perceptive and beguiling novel, which might fall into the dreaded category of midlist book were it not for Nelson's considerable narrative skills. The easy rhythms of her prose, her eye for telling detail and evocative description, the zesty candor of her humor and her rueful but compassionate assessment of the ironies of the human condition make her second novel (after Talking in Bed) a delight to read. (Feb.)