HAPPENSTANCE

Canadian Shields, whose The Stone Diaries (see below), is being released simultaneously with this short pair of midlife- crisis novels, has become prolific and good enough to earn comparison with Margaret Atwood. Here, the story of a marriage is told in two back-to-back novels, one from the husband's view, the other from the wife's. Jack and Brenda Bowman, 40-somethings who live in the Chicago suburbs, have braided lives, but, in her narrative, Brenda leaves Jack and her two kids to attend a convention for a week with her handmade quilts. The Brenda of old used to be ``smiling and matter- of-fact,'' but now she has ``a restless anger and a sense of undelivered messages.'' Things go wrong fast—dizziness, for starters—and after an affair with an engineer and some sitcom, she returns home and feels, for a moment, ``the Brenda of old,'' ``a self that is curiously, childishly brave.'' Meanwhile, Jack, a historian who believes that ``men spend whole lifetimes preparing answers to certain questions that will never be asked of them,'' deals with the kids, helps old friend Bernie (whose wife leaves him), visits a friend who attempted suicide, and finds that ``the void left by his shattered faith had inexplicably grown.'' Picking up Brenda, he feels ``a sudden buckling of his heart, for already he was sealing this moment in the clean preserving gel of history.'' The idea is a bit gimmicky, but the stories play out well. They're not the equal of The Stone Diaries; still, the husband and wife, baptized by brief separation, meet, literally, in the middle of the book, and that sensation—of matching the physical object of the book to the story—is worth the price of admission.