The Last Lovely City

January 4, 1999
Accomplished novelist (Medicine Men) and short storyteller Adams (After You've Gone) exhibits in her latest collection a cast of proudly aging characters whose lives are linked more or less by their attachment to San Francisco. Love has played havoc on these successful professionals and performers, either in or outside of marriage, but they wouldn't dream of giving up. "I think we should try again," remarks the chronically wayward wife in the opening story, "His Women," a remark that could serve as the collection's leitmotiv. Carter, the story's bland academic protagonist, recognizes vaguely that he is "the sort of man to whom women are unfaithful," yet he finds himself agreeing to let the same trouble back into his life. Wandering in and out of sexually satisfying love affairs, the characters are soon baffled to see their relationships peter out. In "The Haunted Beach," a woman ends up at the same beach resort in Mexico that she frequented with her former husband, hoping, fully consciously, that the memories there will ignite her new love. The best writing occurs in the title narrative, an elegiac musing on lost love by the "sadhearted widower," Dr. Benito Zamora, who meets a woman who was his lover 40 years before: "Her voice was like scented oil... light and insidious and finally dirty, making stains." The collection loses some momentum with the rather corny tales of devoted pet owners, then regains it in the last four of these 13 stories, a seamlessly interrelated series involving an adulterous pair of psychiatrists and their troubled spouses. Adams's relentlessly present tense prose can become somewhat mannered; yet the reader is always edified by the startlingly perspicacious or willfully self-deluded observations of her characters, who will find love again at all cost.

December 1, 1998
Adams writes her intricately constructed stories like a spider weaves her fine web, and each tale is a mesh of relationships spread taut to both hold on to old victims and to ensnare the new and unwary. Separated spouses reconsider each other after the red flares of extramarital entanglements have burned out in puffs of toxic smoke. A woman in love with a married man refuses to have an abortion and raises their daughter alone after the abrupt demise of their heretofore passionate affair. Divorced women are skeptical about new lovers, preferring the satisfaction of work (there is an artist, a travel writer, an actress, a psychologist), or even the company of a cat, to yet another initially charming but eventually disappointing man. Adams is adept at describing the most personal aspects of sexual liaisons and the sharpest of self-recognitions, and each of her elegant and involving tales, including the haunting title story, revolves around the impossibility of escaping the past. But Adams is not only a fluent interpreter of emotional minutiae, she is also a practiced observer of West Coast life, including the terror of an earthquake and the symbiotic but tricky relationship between California and Mexico. ((Reviewed December 1, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)