Without Falling

This bildungsroman of a spoiled American, a first novel, tells the story of Tracy (no last name is given), the daughter of a global corporate executive and his dutiful wife, who never manages to shake her rootlessness or forgive her father's philandering and her mother's '50s-style subservience. As an adult, Tracy follows a dim theatrical career and even dimmer men through Paris, London, Berlin and Manhattan. Her relations with lovers, ex-lovers, lovers of ex-lovers and analysts, and the ``anecdotes'' of her childhood constitute the main narrative throughout. Tracy seems intent on scaling the edifice of both her private history and her advancing present ``without falling.'' Unfortunately, Dick establishes Tracy's survival by a stylistic alternation between confessional revelation of the most intimate kind and an impersonal formalism, and deprives the book of the ironic stance that would make the heroine's identity crisis more endearing. Instead, what emerges is an overwrought portrait of common angst, touched lightly by the brush of feminism. (Nov.)