IN THE FAMILY WAY

A group of women deal with the social changes of the mid-1960s in Becker's brightly polished novel.

In Akron, Ohio, in 1965, 26-year-old Lily Berg is happy to consider herself a housewife. Married to a busy physician, she has a toddler and is pregnant with another child. Her sister, Rose Seigel, two years younger, is married to an attorney and working as an elementary school teacher. Lily meets regularly to play canasta with three of her neighbors, and they pass around copies of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, which Lily finds at first horrifying and then intriguing and even comforting. To help around the house, Lily enlists the aid of perky 15-year-old Betsy Eubanks, on loan from the local home for unwed mothers while she waits to deliver her own baby, and the two mothers-to-be become surprisingly close. Over the course of the next few months, Lily and the other women in her circle face a series of challenges, including domestic violence, the need for an illegal abortion, infertility, and divorce. The novel rotates in brisk, snappy chapters through the points of view of Lily, Rose, and Betsy. To some extent, it suffers from a tendency to condescend to its characters for behaving and thinking in ways the author seems to view, from her present-day perspective, as less than enlightened. Becker makes it clear that, though the characters don't know it, Lily's willed joy in playing housewife and Rose's determined rationalizations of her husband's increasingly abusive behavior are doomed from the start. The various storylines are also wrapped up with tidy efficiency and unlikely positivity. But aside from one thoroughgoing scoundrel, the characters are charming and likable, and readers should enjoy spending time with them. Becker doesn't allow her consideration of social issues to overwhelm a brisk narrative in which the characters are too competent and spunky to get caught more than temporarily in melodrama.

Historical novel with a feminist bent and heart to spare.