DALE LOVES SOPHIE TO DEATH by...

DALE LOVES SOPHIE TO DEATH by Robb Forman Dew (HarperPerennial: $10; 217 pp.) and FORTUNATE LIVES by Robb Forman Dew (HarperPerennial: $10; 285 pp.). Dew received the American Book Award for first novel for “Dale Loves Sophie” in 1981; 11 years later, she continued the saga of Dinah Howells and her family in “Fortunate Lives.” Initially, the Howells seem to be the ideal upper-middle-class American family: smart, sane, educated, attractive. Yet Dinah finds her life unsatisfying and somehow lacking. As she surveys a rented summer home in “Dale Loves Sophie,” it seems that “so much life went on there that her own existence could not compare. She was beginning to think that the five of them--she and Martin and the children--were simply too sparse a group to generate such vitality.” Dew uses Dinah’s nagging uncertainties to explore the ways in which the burden of past experience dictates attitudes and alters relationships. Her greatest strength as a writer may be her refusal to tie up her stories in the kind of tidily packaged endings that occur only in fiction. When the dreary, parasitic Netta Breckenridge latches on to the Howells family in “Fortunate Lives,” the reader waits for Dinah to tell off the self-righteous pest. But the dramatic confrontation never occurs: Netta completes her assignment at the nearby college and drifts on, leaving Dinah and her friends to brood over the things they wish they had said in a frustrating but highly credible denouement.