BEAUTIFUL BODIES

An insightful, warm, and gently funny first novel whose considerable narrative drive derives almost entirely from emotional nuance.

Memoirist Cunningham’s (A Place in the Country, 2000, etc.) deftly structured group portrait of six Manhattan women at midjourney begins with substantial sketches (most could stand alone as short stories) of the friends as they head to a party to celebrate the first (wanted) pregnancy among them. Amusingly and effectively, we are introduced to each through real estate. Fifteen years ago, they met at the Theresa Residence for Women; now only Claire, free spirit, world traveler, and expectant mother, remains as the building is razed around her. Among the others are Jessie, a journalist newly in love rushing to prepare her downtown loft for the party, determined not to be a woman waiting for the phone to ring; and pale, frail painter Lizbeth, who fights eviction from her rent-controlled haven while sinking into fantasies of the married man who left her. With one over-the-top exception (self-deluded, materialistic Martha), these are recognizable, multidimensional people, and the accommodations they've made with life are real and poignant. Much of their talk concerns the intransigence of men, the hope that it might be different, and disappointment when it isn't; Cunningham captures it all with sympathy and humor. Nina, consistently left by the many men she beds, asks, “Is there any sound as loud as a zipper on its way up?” Lizbeth, who seeks the consolation of sleep on high-thread-count sheets, “had always had an excellent relationship with her bedding.” Martha, the group's overcritical, puritanical, maternal superego, provides both the tension (will she go too far and ruin the party?) and the too-pat ending, when she admits to the flaws in her perfectly planned life and her need for her friends' support.

Urban thirtysomethings dissected with wisdom, literary skill, humanity, and knowing humor. More, please.