Book Review : Stories Explore the Variety of Response

After You’ve Gone: Stories by Alice Adams (Knopf: $18.95; 220 pages.)

Though these stories are tenuously related by a preoccupation with themes of parting, loss and separation, the ways in which Alice Adams’ characters cope with change, or sometimes with the mere idea of change, lends each one a particular distinction. The author is concerned with the varieties of response that similar circumstances can elicit, and while her people may seem to confront analogous situations, their reactions range from stoicism to despair, with stops at every emotional way station in between.

The title story effectively sets the mood. We’re listening to a woman attorney describing the first few painful months after her poet lover has decamped for an Oregon houseboat with his latest young infatuate. The narrator’s tone is cool and composed, rueful but not self-pitying. She is, after all, a lawyer, adept at making the best of unwelcome facts by setting them down and analyzing the possibilities. For a while, she tells us, “I managed very well indeed, coping with the house and its curious breakages”--all the major and minor appliances, from car to Cuisinart, disintegrating the moment the poet is no longer in residence, as if love were the engine that ran them.

There’s no logic in this, but the symbolism is inescapable. Their mutual friends present another problem, either too eagerly sympathetic, altogether indifferent, or noticeably partisan. Nights are bleak, even though she had never believed the relationship would last forever, only that the first two years were the test. Easily, she admits missing his creative cooking, not flinching from the knowledge that “cooking” covers every aspect of domesticity.

Even so, she keeps her equilibrium until the letters from the new lady love begin to arrive--requests for advice on how to please the man she’s charmed away from the storyteller. The letters are pathetic and unsettling, coming just as the lawyer is beginning to reassemble her own life. She’s played the role of deserted woman with dignity--must she now be her successor’s mentor?

“1940: Fall” is a fictional memoir of the year in which a high school girl first becomes aware of the anguished world beyond the tranquillity of Madison, Wis. Her consciousness is raised by a refugee boy whose anti-Nazi father had been one of the earliest casualties of the war. The story briskly moves forward to the present, when that Midwestern teen-ager, now a mature and respected psychologist, is dining alone in a San Diego restaurant, the common fate of woman authors on promotional tours. Of course the man at the next table is Egon Heller, the refugee in her high school class. Like her, he’s reached distinguished late middle age, and with a bit of prompting, he recognizes her, but not the crucial role he played in her maturation.

“What to Wear” is a remarkable tour de force, showing what a skilled writer can do with the scenario of a woman deciding on an appropriate outfit for a special occasion. Make the woman a professor of literature, the occasion her visit to a lover in a mental hospital, and you’ve turned an apparently banal dilemma into a psychological drama revealing everything relevant to these two people.

There’s a perceptible feminist undertow to these stories, a slight but noticeable pull that becomes apparent only when you’re standing safely on the shore. Adams specializes in admirable women hopelessly involved with unworthy men; virtues and flaws taking sophisticated forms and shapes, appearing in various degrees. The stories are non-judgmental, but there’s no mistaking just which party is generally left to cope, grieve and adjust after the defection of the other. While Adams never actually disparages her male characters, she lets them bare the less agreeable sides of their personalities, while the women glow with courage, understanding and resilience--sometimes only by contrast, but that’s enough.