(3 of 3)
Despite these ingredients of fictional disaster—plus a temptation to relate everything to "feminism"—A Fine Romance deserves a reading. Seton makes such charming, well-written excuses for her clichés: "There's an inherent plotlessness one has to contend with in the lives of civilized people, you see. Their marriages, divorces, are muted, cerebral. It puts a heavy burden on love affairs, do you see? They're the only credible climax left."
Will a reader, then, believe in salvation-by-adultery when proper Dr. Winters finally thaws with Alexia Reed, 35, who boasts "remarkable reddish-gold hair, green eyes, and a smacking style"? Hardly. But by then there's been a lot of lively conversation about Homer, Proust, Darwin and parenting, and Sicilian temples. Everybody talks just beautifully on Seton's bus. "The answer to the problem of alienation, to the difficulties of building a sense of community," she writes, "may be to put people on buses." It's not a bad way to keep an amiable but wobbling novel from going over a Sicilian cliff, either.