Rarely is a friendship between two women as tested as that between Hilda and Pearl, the two sensitive and scarred sisters-in-law in the novel that bears their name. Novelist Alice Mattison has summoned her considerable talents and created a series of characters and conflicts so real and so intense that it is easy to forget the beauty of her narrative. "Hilda and Pearl" is a masterful work, one which reminds us of the beauty of friendship, the imperative of memory and the possibilities of forgiveness. Set in the grim repressive atmosphere of McCarthyism, with skillful flashbacks to earlier decades and pivotal events, the novel traces the resiliency of the human heart when bruised by betrayal, confusion and loss.

The two featured protagonists develop a profound friendship, one rooted not only in the circumstance of marrying brothers, but nurtured by respect, need and fear. Hilda and Pearl mutually confront interrelated conflicts, weighty enough that most friendships would wither and die, and emerge with their integrity and sense of self intact. This is no easy task, as the women not only must face reciprocal recrimination but observe their husbands' relationship fracture as well. Burdened by a restive child and unsettled by a husband whose career is threatened by a witch-hunt mentality, Hilda searches for a sense of peace and place, elusive and ephemeral. Physically dissimilar, Pearl, whose long blonde hair and manifest physicality distinguish her, faces life without confidence or structure. If Hilda is acutely analytical, Pearl is intuitive and accepting. Hilda' sense of history contrasts with Pearl's ahistoric approach to life.

Parallel to the two women's encounter with frayed trust and broken dreams, Nathan Levenson and Mike Lewis suffer a deterioration of their bond. Idealistic, patient and calm, Nathan ruefully observes his own demise after a brief association with communism in the 1930s. Reminding him of the futility of political change is his assimilation-bound brother, Mike, who changed his last name in order to further his own career. Angry, resolute and frustrated, Mike bears the full burden of betrayal, first by his wife and brother, then by his own broken dreams, and finally by his son, Simon.

Mattison advances the action of her novel through pivotal emotional explorations made by Hilda and Nathan's daughter, Frances. Her persistent inquiry about a hidden pair of shoes becomes the string which, when pulled, unravels the secrets of the two households. The author deftly interweaves Frances' coming-of-age with her parents descent into sorrow, recrimination and resolution.

There is no cheap grace in "Hilda and Pearl." Characters unflinchingly face the worst possible circumstances conspiring against loyalty, cohesion and trust. The sheer beauty of how a tested friendship emerges from the crucible of doubt, the generous spirit which animates the women's resiliency and the authentic notion of redemptive love make "Hilda and Pearl" not only worth reading, but worth remembering.

If your relationship with your best friend has survived rocky times, read this book; your experience of the love and friendship between women will be affirmed. If you want to remember the innoncence you had as a girl, read this book; Frances will let you visit with her childhood. This story is honestly told by the the unique voices of young Frances, who in her niavete fills in the holes of her family's story with her own childish fantasy, of her Aunt Pearl, who misplaces the intense love inside her, and of Hilda, Frances's mother, who teaches us that when love is stong enough, there is nothing that can't be forgiven. This is the story of a Jewish family, set in a New York City stuggling through the depression, grappling with Europe's facism, and touched by McCarthy's witch hunt for communists. Read this book; it is beautiful.

Mattison is a good stylist, but her world is limited, and her view is very, very small. She has chosen to confine herself to safe, artful examinations of domestic dailiness. It's pleasant enough stuff, but ultimately, this reader wants something more ambitious, something with greater passion.

The characters in "Men Giving Money, Women Yelling" live in New Haven, Connecticut, site of Yale University, but the college is a supporting character in this set of interconnecting stories. The characters are students and teachers, carpenters and business people and as we progress from story to story we begin to see their lives are all more or less connected. Like the movie "Magnolia" part of the fun of reading these stories is trying to figure out how everyone is related to the other characters. One central figure in all their lives is Denny Ring, a charming but disturbed drug addict. He is one of the "men giving money" of the title, and many of the "women yelling" are yelling in response to his manipulations. As is the case with a lot of short story collections, some of these tales work better than others. Mattison's attempts to depict racial tensions in the area are a little too overt, but her writing shines when showing the outrageous attractiveness of Denny, a dangerous and ultimately doomed protagonist. She is also adept at drawing all the disperate stories together, culminating in a concluding story that is wonderfully satisfying.

The best of dozens of short story collections I have read in recent years. The subtitle "Intersecting Stories" doesn't do justice to the work as a whole. I would call it a novel, many (though not all) of whose chapters could stand alone as stories. Works as a whole -- an important work of fiction by a superb writer.

I imagine there are those who will find "The Book Borrower" a deep and thoughtful examination of the life of a friendship. They will marvel at the technique of introducting a "book-within-a-book" as a means of propelling both the plot-line and examination of character. I assusme that these same readers will indentify with the flaws and fluctuations of the friendship between two women, Deborah and Toby.

I am not one of them. I read this novel awaiting revelations and depth. Instead, page after boring page of petulant, self-absorbed characters, lamenting their marriages, their children, their bosses, their teaching skills, and, most importantly, their selves. Enough, already!

Alice Mattison even borrowed from one of the oldest contrivances in literature, the heroine of a borrowed novel actually appearing in real life -- to complicate (of course) and ultimately, if reluctantly and unwittingly, elucidate the theme of acceptance and forgiveness. I think this would be forgiven were the novel written for lovers of fantasy. But this novel purports to instruct us on the intricacies of friendship and the foibles of modern relationships.

The only character worth remembering is the narrator if novel-within-a-novel. At least she attempts to deal with the notion of Americanization, radical politics, anti-semitism, anarchy, free love, and family tension. Ultimately, however, even Miriam's sensitiblity is lost in this sea of repetitive self-worry and concern.

I guess I expected a much more traditional story of friendship and a nostalgic look at a past generation. Instead I got this unusual, exasperating, at times confusing book. Having said that, if you start, do read it through. It will reward you with its riches. It's the kind of book that will keep coming back at you long after you're finished. At first I thought, people don't talk this way, don't act this way, don't do these things, don't have families like these, and then I thought about it some more, and told myself....yes they do. The characters will make you uncomfortable. You will not know whether to love them or hate them, and you may go back and forth, just like in life. My one complaint, although I argue with myself about it -why call Deborah, Deborah, but call Toby throughout the book by her last name - Rubin? I found it contrived. Maybe I have to get out of a rut in my thinking. I think it's probably just a gender thing, but it still jolted. I got used to it... but just a little.

It is gratifying to read novels that interweave books into the lives of the characters. Sometimes the books scatter ghosts into the present, sometimes they haunt the characters. Michael Cunningham's tremendously popular novel "The Hours" reverberates off Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." In "The Book Borrower," it's "Trolley Girl," a book set in the 1920s and passed between two friends, Deborah and Toby, in a playground in 1975.

"Trolley Girl's" story floats through this one--the story of a friendship between two mothers. It is gracefully done--the tone of the older book infects the tone of the present; details, exclamation points, oddities in thought and conversation have a Dickensian feel to them, even as Patty Hearst is acquitted in the background. But the really fine thing about Alice Mattison 's style is her sense of proportion. Taking a friendship that spans several decades, in which careers are pursued, children hatched and educated, husbands argued with and loved, dogs patted, she makes the friendship into the novel's sun, shining and absorbing light from those other details. When the friends are separated, all of the planets go spinning askew. It's a marvelous galaxy the author has created. Some of the atmospheric pressures between these friends are familiar--jealousy, different talents, different relationships--but many are private, as though the friendship had its own soul that lives on after it's over, even after the book is closed. *