[In the following excerpt, Flower provides a mixed assessment of Beautiful Girl.]

[Adams] has been represented in every O. Henry Award collection for the last eight years, and her three novels (most recently, Listening to Billie last year) have received much praise, but to my mind her fiction fails—despite its numerous attractions—to offer a sufficiently serious criticism of the worlds she knows so well. Adams moves easily from Chapel Hill to New England to San Francisco, usually in the society of the rich: "Ardis Bascomb," the title story begins, "the tobacco heiress, who twenty years ago was a North Carolina beauty queen, is now sitting in the kitchen of her San Francisco house, getting drunk."

Adam's favorite strategy is to place an interesting woman, frequently a beautiful one marred by fat or scars or terminal illness or age, at the center of her stage, and then supply her with admires: a handsome, successful, dullish lover; a teenager disturbed but attracted by her womanly energy; an unfaithful husband who regrets their lost love; an inhibited stranger; an old college roommate; an uncomprehending foreigner. The strategy is dangerous in its tendency to endorse the already vigorous narcissism of these women. Yet Adams is clearly fascinated by the ways people find to imagine themselves, or their lovers, or their parents, as strangers do. And frequently too the result is love deflected toward strangers.

In "For Good" a twelve-year-old girl goes to a party with her father and stepmother, and learns that the hostess was once his mistress. The girl is drawn to this distressed woman far more deeply than to her own mother. When the woman drunkenly embraces a guest and says, "Ah, my long-lost love, why couldn't everything last?", the girl hears real desperation in this stagy remark. It's the stranger, seldom the parent or spouse, who releases the deeper emotions of Adams' characters. The oddly matched couple in "A Jealous Husband" restore their shaky relationship, and their own self-esteem, when she drifts into an affair with a black man. Jealousy, the husband learns, can be both erotic and narcotic. The beautiful rich woman in "Flights" has been scarred in the car accident that killed her previous husband; now she's vacationing with her next (a young, aggressive television producer) on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. She would be another sulky-glamorous American bitch if it weren't for the way we see her, through the dazzled eyes of a young, withdrawn resort-keeper. He's a perfect stranger who understands her inmost thoughts, intuits her fears, and suffers her pain; moreover, she understands him instantly, and deeply. Why is it that only strangers can be so perfect? A much better story, "Winter Rain," describes the maturing of a young woman spending a year in Paris. She rents from a nasty old phoney-elegant Madame who frustratingly refuses to be the friend or surrogate mother the girl wishes for. Unwittingly, Madame confirms and strengthens the girl's identity. There should be more strangers like this in Adams' world.

At their best these stories explore complex relationships in a quick, deceptively offhand manner. They tend to begin with a tense problem (a wife dying, a divorce impending, a moment of wrath, an anxious move to a new place) and unravel gradually, without much climax except a muted sense of recovered balance and diminished expectation. What's too often missing is a final criticism. The woman in "Home Is Where" has a splendid summer romance when she returns to North Carolina to decide about a divorce; but the romance ends, the man goes off to become famous, she marries someone else. One feels neither gladness nor sorrow in such conclusions, but rather an implicit appeal of stylish melancholy: "And later I married the other man, and later still I almost got used to being happy." In "A Pale and Perfectly Oval Moon" the weak husband remembers his complex and difficult wife as "the most remarkable and interesting woman I've ever known." But she's dead now, and he never could convince her in life. Alas, I suppose. These closures seem mostly attempts at elegant gesture. I prefer the ending of "Beautiful Girl" where the former love murmurs consolingly in the drunken woman's ear, "I want you to be my beautiful girl again," and she raises her head abruptly: "'I am a beautiful girl,' she rasps out, furiously."