NAKED LADIES

A politically correct soap opera—with some rare flashes of insight and feeling—from award-winning Chicana novelist Villanueva (The Ultraviolet Sky, 1988—not reviewed; etc.). Part I is set in San Francisco. Alto is Mexican-American and married to Hugh since age 15. She's now 27 and considering suicide. Hugh is Anglo, an ironworker who can't admit he's gay although he's been betraying Alta for years with Bill, an artist who comes down with AIDS. Katie is Anglo and dying of breast cancer. Her parents are upper middle class and cold schemers. Her husband Doug is Anglo working-class, which makes him a bit better. Doug and Hugh both abuse their wives, but we know why: they themselves were abused as children. Everyone's a victim, even Alta's therapist, Cheryl, a blond blue-eyed Anglo who tells Alta how she was abused. Rita, Chicana, has a mastectomy, and Jackie, African-American, drinks, and studies nursing. Their husbands cheat on them. The action takes place in kitchens, cafes, at cookouts in the woods. The scenes are short, the writing flat. Lots of sex, which is either violent or healing, never just so-so. No one laughs or tells a joke in the whole book. There's lots of goddess-talk between women discovering their inner strength. References to the ozone layer and nuclear waster complete the picture. Part II is set in 1999. Alta, now a therapist, counsels Jade, daughter of Japanese and Navajo parents, after rape. Whites torture Alta's black lover. She comes to his defense. She becomes a grandmother. Millennium approaches. You sort of wish it would go away. The honest patches concern Hugh, working-class and gay, whose self-hatred and confusion are well drawn. So are Alta's toughness and her early trials. The rest is programmatic—uplift, propaganda.