The collateral damage from a long-ago love affair resurfaces when Callie Hyde Epstein, now a successful, middle-aged Los Angeles screenwriter, stumbles on a forgotten cache of home movies, circa 1968, in this honest debut novel from screenwriter (Children of a Lesser God
) and memoirist (South Mountain Road
) Anderson. The films document her age of innocence (and its inevitable corruption) when as a young housewife she lived with her steady-if-repressed husband, Irwin, and their three children in one of the 16 Greenwich Village townhouses that border MacDougal Gardens. In all seasons, the children play in the private enclave surrounded by the houses, while their parents gather there to flirt with the counterculture and one another's spouses. Callie yields to temptation and frustration, and has an affair with her neighbor, Sam Messenger. Emboldened by her sexual awakening, she unloads her shocked husband, and in short order the fallout from her newfound freedom teaches her some hard truths. This unsentimental novel is a thoughtful re-examination of a fraught era, but it lacks emotional immediacy and suffers from being told in flashback. Its lack of suspense leaves only the painful witnessing of Callie's blunders as she moves blindly through selfishness to selfhood. Agent, Barbara Hogenson. (Sept.)
