FICTION

IF WISHES WERE HORSES . . . by Francine Pascal (Crown: $20; 272 pp.) If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you know there’s a transcendent moment when you stop struggling, stop translating in your head, and eureka! you’re speaking it. Anna Devlin feels it twice, once when she gets a grip on French, and once more, far more important, when she stops translating from Pity, Loneliness and Bereavement and begins to speak Life without a flaw. Husband Nick--boyish, enthusiastic, a talented journalist--has died of cancer, much too young. Anna, devastated, has tried to put it all behind her, buying a house in the south of France. It doesn’t work. In spite of her bravest efforts to meet new people, immerse herself in a new milieu, she remains dangerously introspective.

Francine Pascal (author of the Sweet Valley High series for teens; this is her second adult novel) bounces flashbacks off Anna’s bowed head to evoke her love story. Nick, nondescript but hellbent, had snatched Anna from her fiance, the standard stuffed shirt, literally at the last minute. In the present, Pascal does widowhood beautifully--the self-imposed alienation, the noxious inertia--but spares us relentless tragedy by deft touches of humor and humanity: Anna trying to bury two pounds of Nick’s ashes under a favorite Central Park bench; looking for a vibrator and settling for a zucchini; grandly ordering from a menu Helene Leger , which turns out to be the name of the chef. She never really breaks, Anna, and when she comes up, we come up with her.