A Place at the Table

A divorced mother of two and a moderately successful New York writer, Rachel Levin is smart, funny, generous, and above all else, clear-eyed. A Place at the Table concerns a period in Rachel's life when she is ending a relationship with a much younger woman, becoming a grandmother, considering writing trashy novels for money, consoling a friend whose marriage is foundering, attempting to rescue Deirdre, another friend, from madness and confronting her own mortality. It is the definitions sand distinctions between Rachel and Deirdre that make the novel not just warm and witty but poignant and sage. Rachel has no fantasies about the madness that art creates or demands. Art and madness are separate, and there is nothing glamorous in her friend's decline. It is all loss. Similarly, there is nothing romantic in Rachel's own suffering. Loss is loss, art is art, trash is trash. Rachel closes her story counting her blessings, the usual ones --- work, children, friends, means, appetites. Pleasures of the mind and body, simple and comples. Sanity. And I still have one breast. This list, when one reaches it at the end of the novel, seems suddenly new and fresh, graceful and funny. The ordinary words have taken on the extraordinasry power of this wonderful, wise woman.