cover image Sleeping Arrangements

Sleeping Arrangements

Laura Shane Cunningham. Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95 (195pp) ISBN 978-0-394-56112-7

``Inside our apartment, we are gradually creating customs and inventing our own special language.'' So eight-year-old Lily describes life with two bachelor uncles in the Bronx of the 1950s. The unorthodox arrangement came about after the death of Lily's mother, Rosie--who invented a war-hero husband, improvised his death in the Korean war and bequeathed to her daughter a persistent hunger for information about him. We follow Lily through her adolescence, aided and abetted by uncles Len and Gabe, who keep house, cook erratically, pursue their own dreams and tend their precocious niece. This odd, yet creative, household was a happy one, even as they coped with the ups and downs of Lily's schooling and her indoctrination into junior high-school society, where she learned the sexual ploys of her peers, entertainingly detailed here. In an effective memoir that delineates a real, if idiosyncratic, world, Cunningham captures a special slice of New York with humor and integrity. (Oct.)