DISAPPEARING INGENUE

Novelist and short-story writer Pritchard (Selene of the Spirits, 1998, etc.) links eight tales in the life of her slightly off-kilter, often misguided but always-intriguing heroine.

In “Port de Bras,” Eleanor is an awkward 12-year-old goody-goody whose friend Donna Rae is working-class and wild. Donna Rae’s downfall sets Eleanor’s course, awakening her sexuality. “Salve Regina” (a 2000 O’Henry winner) finds Eleanor in a Catholic high school where her devotion to the Virgin Mary combines with her crush on a nun. After her newest wild friend dies in a motorcycle crash on her way to an abortion, Eleanor drops Catholicism and finds her good looks. But beauty doesn’t bring enlightenment. By “The Case of the Disappearing Ingénue,” Nora suspects her first husband of cheating and compensates by spying, with embarrassing results, on a local horse-owner she suspects of murder. In “High Fidelity,” she’s a successful romance writer and rather glamorous twice-divorced mother of two. Coming home with her newest male conquest, she realizes that her daughters are the “truest romances of her life”—a motherly declaration readers should doubt. The next story, “The Widow’s Poet,” mentions the girls only fleetingly as grown, while Nora, a mere 48, is already a widow after a long, childless third marriage. Having evolved from romance writing to poetry, Nora lets her obsession with a young student take over her life in humiliating ways. “Her Last Man” uses a more aggressive, free-form style as Nora nurses her dying father, her first passion. In “Funktionslust,” a Pushcart-winner, Nora has become Eleanor again, working a dead-end job and hiding a gorilla in her garage for an ecoterrorist friend—until, in a final leap of faith, she and the animal off, Thelma-and-Louise style.

Stories, like their heroine, so brave and full of life that obvious flaws—lapses in logic; tendencies to jump off romantic cliffs—are forgivable.