Peachy

Not much time passes in this short but zany novel: Peachy Marvel (nee Patricia Fish) installs her only surviving daughter in first-year student housing at Harvard, meditates in a Cambridge bookstore for an hour and a half, gets picked up by a man who turns out to be her favorite author, drives back to her small New Jersey hometown and attends a niece's wedding, where she encounters her estranged husband for the first time in a year. But in each of these episodes, Wagman ( Playing House ; Magic Man, Magic Man ) allows Peachy--a Jewish chicken farmer's 45-year-old granddaughter, now having hot flashes and feeling less than sexy for the first time in her life--to cavort wildly through her memories. These include her favorite quotes from Flaubert and Nietzsche as well as from her husband (``Be charming!'' and ``Once a man really falls in love, he never falls out''). Her discovery of sex and writing, expulsion from high school, alienation from her father, marriage at 18 to an adoring but possibly wayward mate, loss of her first child--Peachy delivers all this (and more) in a breathless blend of misery, outrage and glee. And she wends her manic way to a hopefulness that many readers will find exhilaratingly accessible. (Jan.)