Midnight Lemonade

An assured writer with an appealing, distinctive voice makes her debut with this absorbing and touching novel, which will be compared to Sue Miller's The Good Mother . Goethe writes with lyric intensity, tart humor and serious insight about a woman's life and the difficult choices a mother must make. The product of a small Louisiana town and a sheltered convent education, Katherine Roberts is totally innocent of sex and life when at 19, a college dropout, she is seduced by a professor 12 years her senior. She marries him five weeks later. Three children and refuge in alcohol keep her from acknowledging her husband's philandering until divorce is inevitable. Katherine's precarious existence as a single parent is bracketed by the deaths of her own parents and estrangement from her sister. When a new lover enters her life, immediate and ironic punishment follows, with agonizing repercussions. Irreverent and witty, Katherine is a sympathetic heroine whose maturity reinforces her emerging feminine consciousness. But she is hampered by an enduring guilt about her children, her parents and her need for sexual fulfillment. Goethe has a sure, wry touch with scenes of domestic life, both hilarious and sobering, and her narrative hums with energy and dramatic suspense. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates. (Apr.)