Maybe Gilchrist doesn't have a novel in her. She's such a good short story writer but this attempt really shows her weaknesses. It's almost like an outline for a novel that she didn't get around to filling in.

The book opens with this sharp, detailed description of a pubescent girl--roughly around Gilchrist's age--meeting a girl who will soon become her best friend. Then we fast forward to college at Vanderbilt and Gilchrist forgets to describe why these girls have stuck together and what has happened to what's her name in the first place.

The dating is vague at this point, but since I later concluded it was smack in the 1960s ...well, you can't start off with the first day of college's clothing (something Gilchrist can whip off when she really knows a period) and never get back to it. How fashions in clothes, drugs and sex changed so rapidly in this time just can't be avoided and the particular permutations at a Southern college would have been interesting. You also have to study up on what kids were reading; you can't just fall back on Shakespeare and Auden.

Even bigger problems with the menfolk, the brothers that the two friends marry. Again, the outline problem: Gilchirst introduces the brother Sarah marries and forgets to tell anything else about him, never mind what their marriage was like.

So then we come to the 1990s and Sarah gets a second chance with the brother she wanted the first time around. You have to hang in a long time, but the novel picks up again with a character and age (feisty middle age) that Gilchrist is so comfortable with, even if the idea that Sarah is working for Time magazine isn't believable.

I think it might have worked as a series of two or three stories about Sarah and this man in different times. ( )