Living on Air

Maude Pugh is born and bred in 1960s suburban Long Island, in a "houseful of failures, each feeling terrible and trying to make the next one feel worse." Her domineering, self-involved father, Milt, is a struggling artist who paints every room in their house black as a dramatic backdrop to his brightly colored modernist canvases. Maude's mother, Nina, is defensive with the rich neighbors she fears are her social superiors and resentful of her daughter for outshining Maude's disaffected older brother, Seth, who flees home at 16. Although Maude, whom Shapiro tracks through her teen years, aspires to be an artist in her own right, she also lusts after the good life exemplified by Milt's upscale art students, matrons swathed in expensive silk scarves "as intricately patterned as illuminated manuscripts." So Maude secures a short-lived scholarship to Bay Farm, a pricey prep school where she befriends Weesie, a child of privilege who thinks poverty is romantic, and gives her heart to Danny, who eventually betrays her. Shapiro (The Right Bitch ) is a shrewd anthropologist well versed in the cultures of adolescence, the '60s and class strife, but she sometimes falters in her psychological portraiture, waxing precious and self-conscious rather than astute. (May)