Cline's eminently readable, tender tale mixes empathy and quiet humor, adolescent yearning and adult understanding. Returning to Ohio from Los Angeles to clean out her room as her mother prepares to move to New York for a research job, Denny expects revelation. "As they pull into the driveway, Denny waits for the feeling of home to wash over her. As she opens the car door, she draws a deep breath of the still, hot air. She smells lawn cuttings, dying barbecues, exhaust. Nothing happens. The way the eleventh stair creaks doesn't do it, either. Nor does the smell of the freshly laundered pillowcase on her childhood bed. No wonder she is not a Method actor."

In the last section, when Denny has relocated to Manhattan herself and taken up playwriting, this wry 36-year-old has the opportunity to become a mother, via the potential adoption of the 12-year-old African-American son of her recently deceased friend. That a kind of Prince Charming (a blue-eyed former Brat Packer turned director) appears in the final scene is a testament to the power of chick lit, though the fact that he's a divorced father with his own adolescent to contend with assures us that another story is just beginning.

book cover

"We Need to Talk About Kevin"
By Lionel Shriver
416 pages
Perennial
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Then there's the mother of all recent above-chick-lit novels, last year's "We Need to Talk About Kevin," by Lionel Shriver, just released in paperback. Eva Khatchadourian's son is the teenage killer -- by crossbow -- of seven students, a teacher and a janitor in his high school. Deep maternal ambivalence predated Kevin's conception and continued throughout his childhood. "What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child?"

This story is the most extreme, of course, in this lot of over-the-top plots. Of course, Shriver could have illustrated the fear of motherhood without resorting to the Columbine reference. But what this conceit does is allow the author to explore her topic to its core, as she has created as unsympathetic a portrait as possible of the boy -- and his mother, the former travel company owner and Manhattan-dwelling sophisticate, whose sharp clothes and smart dinner parties and monthly treks to one continent or another have been curtailed by the care and feeding of her firstborn.

The epistolary method Shriver uses, letters to Eva's absent husband, strains belief, yet ultimately that's not what trips us up. It's Eva's relentless negativity that becomes boring and repetitive in the first half of the book, the endless recounting of her loss of svelteness, her loss of freedom. What was hailed as feminist comes across as vain and selfish -- yes, that's right, the very hallmarks of chickdom. Could Eva Khatchadourian be chick lit's very own patron saint? During her pregnancy, Eva racked her brain "for what in all this -- the diapers, the sleepless nights, the rides to soccer practice -- I was meant to be looking forward to."

She goes further. "Casting my eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt ... I once turned heads with a short skirt. Ever notice how many films portray pregnancy as infestation, as colonization by stealth? ... Any woman whose teeth have rotted, whose bones have thinned, whose skin has stretched, knows the humbling price of a nine-month freeloader ... My face was younger but, I thought, dumber looking."

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