Notable

THE WOMAN WHO LIVED IN A PROLOGUE

by Nina Schneider

Houghton Mifflin; 479 pages; $13.95

Nina Schneider has taken the title of her remarkable first novel from The Tempest: "What's past is prologue." The woman who lived in a prologue is a canny, cultivated Jewish matriarch who looks back upon her life story as a relentless series of false starts. As Ariadne Arkady tells it, hers was the archetypal "womanly" existence destined for the girl child born to immigrant parents around the turn of the 20th century. Denied a college education by her doting but traditional father, she is matched to an accountant with a Sephardic pedigree and a prim nature that denies her sensuality through 40 years of marriage. Four children are born and bred amidst a welter of domesticities. Passions are expended in the composition of herbaceous borders, the concoction of raspberry tarts and the preparation of potions of cocoa laced with rum and chocolate shavings. Yet Ariadne moves briskly through this classic obstacle course. And why not? She was named for the Greek princess who knew her way around a maze, and those false starts tell much about the female condition. Some are searing: a humiliating first love, a horrific illegal abortion, even an infanticide of mythic proportion. Other beginnings--an unfulfilled love affair, a suicide attempt--erupt with a pyrotechnic glare that gradually dims under the author's keen, ironic scrutiny. In this case, the prologue is an end unto itself.

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