BLAMING

This last book was completed just before Elizabeth Taylor's death, ironically prefigured by the central theme here, the unexpected death of Amy Henderson's husband Nick on a trip to Istanbul. There is really not too much ""blaming"" in Amy's uneasy aftermath even though she had lost patience with Nick's ""too long convalescence"" and now pauses, retrospectively, over the actual boredom of their marriage--untidy, newspaper-littered Sunday afternoons. She avoids the solicitous gestures of her son; she retreats from the also widowed doctor who would like her to share his loneliness; and she can't escape a young woman, Martha, met on the trip, who keeps dropping in, implicating her first in her life and then in her death. This imposes another guilt to reason or wish away. This is by no means Elizabeth Taylor's best book; it's sketchy, almost as tentative as Amy, only too well aware of her diminished choices in a world that recedes and encloses. Be that as it may--the novel is graced with some comforting amenities and tactful insights and small pleasures--a glass of cream sherry in the late afternoon of life.