Sister Gin

Lovers Su and Bettina--and their network of elderly relatives and friends--confront aging, alcoholism, menopause, disillusionment and lesbian identity in North Carolina, 1974. Arnold's ( Baby Houston ) long-out-of-print first novel is predominantly vague and impressionistic, but certain episodes are stunningly honest and memorable for distilling the essence of women's interior lives. While each has bouts with self-loathing (``She's thin. Does she know what getting dressed is like if you're fat?'') and shock of aging (``It was a terrible thing that the mind knew no age at all, could dart from seventy-seven to thirty-two in a fraction of a second without oneself ever being aware''), the characters function best as symbols of a woman's need to come to terms with her true desires. The menopausal experience is central to the plot as the pivotal though awkward passage to rebirth ``as soon as a woman's body stops being under the moon's dominion. The child and the old don't go by clocks and don't know fear. Time took away the child and only time can give her back.'' (Sept.)