FAMILIAR PASSIONS

The bad news is that this is yet another saga of a wife who, dumped by her husband, is thereby forced to find herself; in fact, it bears an uncomfortable surface resemblance to Gillian Martin's Passage of Time (1978, p. 895). The good news, however, is that it's by Nina Bawden, author of Afternoon of a Good Woman, and that it therefore has enough smiles, winks, and stark touches to sustain our interest as it travels its rather wispy course. Bridle Starr, 32--wife to 50-ish James, mother to their young daughter (at boarding school), stepmother to James' two grown children--is given a stuffy, formal heave-ho on the eve of their 13th wedding anniversary. Refusing to cooperate with James' civilized plan for separation, Bridie storms out, realizing with incredible speed what a pig James has been all along, and heads home. . . to her 70-year-old parents, darling Muff and sardonic psychiatrist Dadda. The usual just-separated traumas await--her own shabby apartment, a new romance. But the central premise here is that Bridie's unsettled state leads her to investigate her own past; she's an adopted child, but who was her mother, what genes can she count on? Muff tells all--or all she knows, at any rate--and Bridle tracks down her natural mum in Brighton, discovering that she's the daughter of a cigar-smoking, tough-talking, long-suffering novelist. So there's Bridie's answer: ""She could never be purely good and gentle like Muff, but she could be strong, like her gallant old mother!"" Yet another parental revelation will surface, with a fadeout as Bridle confronts, at last, a roomful of certified blood relations. . . . Not much pow or zip, perhaps, and the thematic stitchings are hardly seamless; but Bawden's characters never say precisely what you'd predict they'd say, so there's a speck of surprise on most every page--a minor, but distinct, attraction.