FICTION

AMERICAN DREAMS by Norma Klein (Dutton: $17.95; 276 pp.). The author plants a bold four-letter word on the first line, warning fans of her 16 young-adult novels (including “Mom, the Wolf Man and Me” and “Confessions of an Only Child”) of sophisticated reading ahead. This story of two couples who have grown up in New York City in the ‘50s, “When most of her friends had European parents (and) thought Adlai Stevenson right-wing,” begins with their college prom double date, and continues as death, divorce and homosexuality separate them.

Oddly, it is written in the present tense, and yet is intricately constructed of flash-forward chapters at five-year intervals from each of the four’s point of view. Exercising the same skill she uses when writing for the young, Norma Klein fleshes out her parental characters with such diverse and sympathetic personas that here they almost steal the interest from the juvenile leads.

Readers who came of age in that era and milieu will most appreciate the characters, and the self-understanding achieved at last when one says: “At times I hate being mature and settled, it all seems so dead. I even feel this crazy nostalgia for the time we spent together, yet at the same time it was so hideous.”