Are You Mine?

Frucht ( Snap ), an accomplished novelist and short-story writer, offers wit and substance in this, her third book. The novel concerns family happiness--and the hazards that life presents to it. She sets and keeps a terrific comic pace that is never only comic, beginning with the very beginning, in which Douglas, young husband of Cara, makes love to a woman he barely knows after an even younger man abruptly dies in the act. The note struck early is struck throughout: love is a mortal risk, though with a touch of the absurd in it. Frucht follows Cara and Douglas, already the parents of two children, on the voyage of discovery brought on by her unplanned third pregnancy and the moral dilemmas this suggests: whose choice is it, anyway, to have a child or decide against it? Who pays the psychic price for an abortion? How is a marriage changed by a man's determination to have a vasectomy? Frucht considers these and other questions without insisting on simple resolutions; her novel is full of real-life conflicts that yield richness. The power of the prose is its humor and its energy, swelling up around characters who very quickly grow close to us. Grove will simultaneously release the paperback edition of Frucht's second novel, Licorice . Author tour. (Apr.)