A BIG STORM KNOCKED IT OVER

Colwin's recent death, at a grievously young age, removed one of the fresher, sunnier, funnier, smarter novelists from the scene; this posthumous and fifth novel, though hardly her best, makes you remember that painfully. Jean Louise is a 30-ish book designer for a New York publishing house, regularly hit on by her rakish boss Sven and confused by the disloyalties of her female co-workers—yet she's essentially blissful thanks to her marriage to calm, unanxious chemist Teddy. She has a wonderful best friend, too—Edie, a caterer, who with her black husband Mokie replicates Jean Louise's contentment pretty much down the line. Jean Louise's problem is that at base she feels herself hardly deserving of such happiness- -not for anything she's done, but because of the skeptical, hard-on-herself person she just generally is. When she gives birth to a child, Miranda, the wry joy is only intensified. But a part of her still wonders whether she wouldn't be more temperamentally suited to hopping into bed with Sven the rouÇ and suffering the consequences luxuriously. Everything you expect in a Colwin novel is here—Jean-Louise and Edie, plus their spouses, seem like updates, in fact, of the delightful, too-good-to-be-true pair of couples that roamed through Colwin's best novel, Happy All the Time (1978)—and all that's missing is drama, some wrinkling that might leave any of the characters somewhat different or changed at the end from what they were at the beginning. The lack of architectural tone makes the book read like a series of skits, set-pieces, all feeling a bit skimpy, abridged. Still, Colwin's many fans will savor the willfulness, wisdom, and the sharp-eyed noticings here.