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BOOK REVIEW : Subversive Lessons in a ‘Circle of Friends’ : CIRCLE OF FRIENDS, <i> by Maeve Binchy</i> . Delacorte Press, $19.95, 566 pages

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Most novels--wittingly or not--present themselves as more than they are: A love story will play out against a war; a historical novel has “history” to jack it up into respectability.

But “Circle of Friends” presents itself as something less than it is: Just another tale of two girls growing up in the 1950s in a tiny Irish village, and coming of age during their first university year in Dublin. (Personally I’d run from that description, but I hope you don’t.) “Circle of Friends” is about commerce and freedom and happiness and friendship and love, and most of all, about how things work. It’s daring, subversive, remarkably inventive.

In the little town of Knockglen, we first see Benny (short for Bernadette) celebrating her 10th birthday. She hopes for a pink velvet dress but gets a sweater and a skirt, not because her parents don’t love her, but because she’s a chunk of a child--not just fat, but big, husky, enormous. And, of course, labeled as such by the villagers.

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On this birthday, Benny becomes friends with Eve, an orphan raised by nuns in the local convent. The waifish Eve is the offspring of a scandalous local marriage: The daughter of the nearest Protestant landowner who ran off with a lowly Catholic gardener. Both of these parents have died, but the Protestants who live in the Big House still lord it over the village in ever-more seedy splendor, while foisting poor Eve on the nuns.

(In the rest of this prologue we are introduced to a full set of characters who make up a Chaucerian Field of Folk. The nicest is Mother Francis, who loves Eve like her own daughter. The worst is craven, mean-spirited Sean Walsh, a nasty dweeb who’s hired by Benny’s father to help in their store and who plans to marry chunky Benny as soon as she grows up so that he can inherit the store.)

Flash forward eight years. Benny is still big. Eve is still poor as stones, but after an awful week in a Dublin convent she asks her Protestant family to put her through university (tuition only--she’ll work for her own room and board in the city). Then a great, 400-page sorting out begins. The two girls meet Nan, a blond beauty who gets what she want through her looks. Yes, it’s a stereotype, but one that functions. Nan comes from a drunken home and has a million calculated plans for her escape up the closed Irish social strata. And Nan, because she thinks about this stuff 24 hours a day, teaches the naive Benny and Eve how things work.

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Nan’s great weapons are intelligence and beauty. Benny and Eve make do with loyalty and friendship. Back in Knockglen, two young people from the tradesman classes have moved in with their respective aunt and uncle. Pre-hippies Fonsie and Clodagh believe in commerce for its own sake, in flash and dash and fun.

For her first college dance, Benny goes to Clodagh to have a dress made. The crowd of Dublin eligible bachelors is made to rethink its priorities, because even though Benny is maybe 5 feet, 10 inches and 180 pounds, she has an astonishing chest! And she’s funny and nice.

In fate’s first throw of the dice Benny wins Jack Foley, the handsomest man in college. But here’s where it gets interesting. Is “love” what life is about? Is marriage the cat’s meow? Forget what women want--do men even want it? What if people got together for fun instead of love? What if friendship were the highest of all values?

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Back in Knockglen the idea of commerce is examined in the same way. The Protestant man in the Big House sells his life and soul to get his house renovated. The dweebish Sean Walsh lies and cheats and steals and never has any fun as he plots to trap the now-majestic Benny into a loveless marriage. But the raffish Clodagh and Fonsie take their shops and make them into wonderful places to play.

This is a madly subversive book. It purports to answer such harmless questions as: “What shall I wear?” but is, in fact, an almost perfect handbook on: “How shall I live?”

Next: Charles Johnson reviews “Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools” by David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot (Yale University Press).

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