Summer Gloves

Gilbert has a talent for using laughter as both scalpel and bandage. In this novel former beauty queen Pammy is the daughter of a beauty queen and the mother of another. She's the wife of a former salesman turned college professor, a man who's moved on while she's been running in place, preserving her looks to make him feel young. Desperately trying to hold things together by piling on lies and pretending nothing is wrong, Pammy robs their savings account to announce victory after a disastrous kiddie pageant, blithely dismissing her daughter's tears. "I squeezed the back of her neck to let her know I'd snap it in two if she even gave a hint...." Discovering evidence of her husband's infidelity she first resolves to fight for him and just as quickly reverses herself, grabs her daughter and heads for her mother. "Even if she hated me and I hated her...I knew that for as long as she lived she'd always be there...." Not that Pammy plans to tell her anything. The mother, "Miss New Jersey," instantly shows herself to be lively, funny, a good sport -- hardly the repressive witch her daughter has portrayed. She delights in her grandaughter and tells hilarious stories of Pammy's childhood. Only gradually do her ambitions surface, her itching need to perfect her grandaughter -- at least from the outside. Meanwhile, Pammy tests her attractiveness and patches up her self-esteem, toying with new love, basking in a rare indulgence of selfishness while her daughter approaches the dangerous age of13 alone. While Gilbert's oblique exploration of the distance a woman will go for love, true or false, is savagely amusing, it's the explosive mother-daughter scenes that give the book its scope and laugh-out-loud power.