MADE IN HEAVEN

As light as a whiffleball and just as uncertain in its designation -- this first, perhaps first person, overview of Stephanie Stuart's young life is told in a skittish (a kind word for kittenish) fashion and takes place all over within a fairly restricted circle of dancing school, boarding school, Radcliffe and Harvard and Hasty Pudding and what seems an artifact -- a coming out party. Stephanie likes jokes -- practical jokes -- and plays them with some imagination -- but her first love for Sanborn ends up as a bad one (a pregnancy, forced marraige, miscarriage, and dissolution of the ties that were never intended to bind). She goes to Paris with Danny, her ""token faggot,"" and they have a special relationship since he's a ""once-in-a-lifetime person"" but apparently not for her although at times she seems to wish he were. Her youth has to carry what obviously cannot last much past it -- it's like the head on a chocolate soda.