Picturing Will

Ann Beattie. Vintage Books USA, $15 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-679-73194-8

In this meditation on psychic survival in the 1980s, five-year-old Will adapts to unconventional family life with his single mother, his philandering father and his mother's lover. PW remarked that although the book flounders in parts, ``Beattie offers gimlet insights on the compromises of marriage, men's emotional armor, sex as escape, the terrors of childhood.'' (Jan.)

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