NONFICTION - March 24, 1991

REINVENTING HOME: Six Working Women Look at Their Home Lives, edited by Carroll Stoner and Laura Green (Plume: $8.95 , paper; 288 pp.). Perhaps the best way to characterize this book is to point out that excerpts have been sold to Glamour, Lear’s and the Ladies Home Journal--a veritable soup-to-nuts of the women’s magazines, and indicative of the growing desire to take today’s domestic life seriously. Unfortunately, the 60-odd essays in “Reinventing Home” are so short that they rarely gather meaning--probably a forlorn hope in any case, considering that the subjects addressed include socks, coffee, messiness, dishwashers, gadgets, kitchen knives and husbands’ clothing choices. It’s easy for readers (of either sex) to identify with the situations and attitudes described here, but that’s almost the only reaction these essays stir up, for the writing is uniformly facile. I won’t be alone, I suspect, in wishing that Laura Green had written more about the home life of her union-organizer mother and less about closets and drawer liners.