In her third and finest novel, the author of Mrs.

Beneker and A Loving Wife gives us a charming and

moving (and unself-righteous) portrait of that much

maligned woman, the middle-class, middle-aged lib

eral lady, trying to understand her "now generation"

children through her memory of her own "political"

past.

Jo (Mrs. Ben Baer) is the nice New York lady

you ve seen lunching at the Plaza, browsing at Brcn-

tano s and Doubleday s, choosing lamb chops in

D Agostino s-and tutoring ghetto boys, and taking

part in the candlelight vigil for peace in front of St.

Patrick s. She has been called an egghead, a bleeding

heart, a Comsymp, but what she is is a woman of

feeling whose heart is as touched by headlines as it is

by her own children.

Jo s own two children now fill her heart with con-

fusion and fear. They belong to the generation that

lives in chaotic shim pads, that scorns material things,

that doesn t marry (or feels guilty if it does), that

nervously contemplates adopting an American In-

dian-or should it be hlack?-baby, that cngages full-

time in protest, that vanishes from sight or hearing

for months at a time. And when her son finds himself

on the fringes of serious political trouble, Jo, in ter-

ror, relives her own soul-scarching time: the days

when she herself was called beforc a Congrcssional committee-an ordeal from which she is just now, a

whole generation later, beginning to recover.

How she comes to terms with her children, her

fears, and her confusions is told in A Woman of

Feeling. Among its many pleasures: an intelligent

and lovable heroine and, perhaps for the first time,

an essential sensibility defined-in a novel that ex-

plores, seriously and with grace, the relationship

between parents and grown children today.