A WOMAN OF FEELING

Jo is yet another of Violet Weingarten's attractive, conciliatory, troubled, and sometimes threàtened women rounding the bend into middle age well aware of the draft coming from all sides as she turns the corner. She hasn't the insouciance of Mrs. Beneker or that inconstant Loving Wife but any semi-sophisticated castoff mother will recognize her (in themselves) as she gets up in the morning without quite enough to do; or goes to see her friend Cassie who is facing down death without her two daughters who have disappeared into the counterculture; or as she tiptoes all around the problems of her own children who don't share them with her -- killing with undemanding kindness -- but killing all the same. A daughter, Maggie, who has one child, is thinking of adopting a black child -- and a son, Peter, incommunicado in his wretchedness over a young woman, gone the route from abandoned baby to ashram. Mrs. Weingarten has a little harder time in this book keeping her story together and wrapping it up with anything more than the cold comfort certitude (""it's hard to live with ambivalence"") for this day and restless age. Take it at its pretty face value -- an apposite, effortless entertainment.