LOOSE LIPS

Brown brings back the wacky Hunsenmeir sisters attended by all the good and not-so-good folk of Runnymede (Six of One, 1978; Bingo, 1988), as middle age and war give a new edge to their chronic if overhyped sibling rivalry. Runnymede, straddling the Mason-Dixon line, is one of those fictional towns full of people who gossip and bicker but whose hearts are mostly kind. There are, however, a few exceptions: the unforgiving Josephine Smith, Juts’s mother-in-law, and the treacherous Rife brothers—after Pearl Harbor, they try to blame a fire they set on the town’s only Japanese-American. When the story opens in April 1941, Louise (Wheezer), devout and prissy, is approaching her 40th birthday and doesn’t want to admit it; she’s also worried about her adolescent daughter Mary. Now 36, younger sister Juts (Julia), a free-spirited rule-breaker, wants a baby, but the problem may be husband Chessy’s infertility. As the years whirl by, the sisters face the return of their long-gone father, Chessy’s affair, and Mary’s teenage pregnancy. They also add their own colorful contribution to everything from church, where Juts’s cat destroys the altar flowers on Easter, to the war effort. On duty one night as CivilAir Patrol volunteers, they sound the siren after seeing geese flying overhead, claiming they saw German Stukas. And when Juts mentions Wheezer’s age at Cadwalder’s soda fountain, the sisters get into such a fight that they have to open a beauty salon (The Curl “n” Twirl) to pay for the damage they cause. Chessy and Juts eventually adopt Nicole, the daughter of a young woman who went to Washington to work and became pregnant. By 1950 the two sisters feel a lot older, not much wiser but still determined to keep fighting—mostly life, yet often each other. Vivid characters and strong women. The frequent one-liners often seem more sitcom than novel material, going nowhere and telling less, but there are still good laughs along the way.