An American woman is caught between the solid

husband she counts on never leaving, her five-year-

old son, and an English boyfriend who is deter-

minedly trespassing in her life: "Far down the street,

seen from behind, with his worn Levi s, scuffed

leather jacket, and close-cropped fair head, Brian

could have been a rough American kid, even a gang

member. This was a London ideal, and an illusion he

spent some effort perpetuating: as she ran after it, it

charmed her." Through four linked stories set in Lon-

don, the theme of love chaste, evaded, mistrusted,

or returned to--is pursued with a novella-like com-

plexity. Complex, too, are the links among a second

set of stories, set in New Mexico ("After reading the

book s first quarter," the Los Angeles Times reviewer

wrote of Elizabeth Tallent s Museum Pieces, "you could

find your way around Santa Fe by moonlight"): a

crumbled adobe house is renovated by a young hus-

band, short on time yet long on generosity, who tries

to please both his somewhat prickly (and newly preg-

nant) wife and his miserly but truly needy Hispanic

neighbor.

Elizabeth Tallent s two previous books have estab-

lished her reputation as an elegant, engaging writer

whose special territory is (in the words of Michiko

Kakutani in The New York Times) "the complicated

geometry of emotions between men and women, par-

ents and their children." In this, her second collection

of stories, we see her skills and emotional range

deepen as she presents crucial episodes from a number

of very varied lives: His young wife s pregnancy dis-

turbs a professor of mathematics, especially when she

turns for comfort in an entirely unexpected direction

--to his ex-wife; an infatuated eighteen-year-old re-

ceives a mysteriously affecting birthday gift from her

older, married lover, in a rendezvous set entirely in a pickup truck; under the frightened eyes of his father a

son dives into the Rio Grande to try to rescue a pair of

struggling canoeists; and, in a moment of crisis, a

battered married woman seeks out the gentle high-

school boyfriend she has ignored for years.

Not only in the sweep of its settings, but also in

its insight, seriousness, and wit, Time with Children is

the strongest fiction yet fi-om a young writer whose

work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories,

the O. Henry Award Prize Stories, The Graywolf Short

Story Annual, and the Pushcart Prize and Editor s Choice

anthologies.