If Love Were All

Taking its title from one of Wallace Stevens's great laments of marital disappointment, Wall's fifth novel (after Mother Love) concerns 47-year-old schoolteacher and widow Charlotte Haberman, who shocks her three college-age children by selling their small-town Nebraska house eight months after the death of her husband, Stan. A newspaperman, Stan was deified by both the community and his offspring, who also idealize their parents' 27-year marriage. What the siblings don't know is that each of their parents had a never-talked-about past: Stan's previous marriage was a subject he avoided, as was Charlotte's first love and the source of her hidden heartbreak, a soldier named Cory Lee Jones, who broke up with her when he was in Vietnam. Now, Charlotte is determined to find out whatever happened to Cory Lee. More important, though, she is aware that she can, for the first time, reach out for what she wants instead of settling for what comes her way. The moral of this gentle tale, that one must choose one's own life and accept disillusionment and disappointment with grace, goes down easily, while the perils of self-denial are played out convincingly by secondary characters. A subplot involving a crisis of conscience for Charlotte over a term paper by one of her students that offends the staunchly Christian community proves to open one door as others close. If at times the Haberman children's overprotectiveness of Charlotte sounds too extreme to be true, Wall's simple prose brings gossipy, claustrophobic, Newberg, Neb., gracefully to life. (Aug.)