Though the titles of Alice Adams' books often sound like the names of popular songs, the books themselves are beautifully crafted tales of the complexities of modern life, particularly for women. It is difficult to publish a collection of short stories these days, and Alice Adams has paid her dues to the market place with some very good novels. But it seems to me that the short story is her true métier. Like a watercolorist, she is skilled in rapidly and economically landscaping her world. The layers of oil color, though not beyond her ability, seem less suited to her temperament.

To See You Again is a collection of nineteen stories whose protagonists are women, nearly all of whom live in or near San Francisco, though there are occasional forays into Mexico which seems here almost to be a suburb of San Francisco. In most of these, some precipitating event both frames the story and acts as a kind of window through which the whole of an emotional life can be observed. These events can be trivial: the loss of a suitcase, an unscheduled stop by an airplane near a character's home town, the glimpse of a woman across a restaurant who looks like some other woman, long forgotten. But in each case the event leads to a small epiphany, in which at least the possibility of change is opened.

In "The Break In," for example, a woman and the man she is to marry must deal with the vandalizing of his beautiful house near Lake Tahoe.

Watching him, looking up from time to time as she fails to concentrate on her book, Cynthia has a sudden and curious perception, which is: Roger had actually enjoyed everything about this break in—the dramatic suspense of the drive up, the speculations as to what they would find, wondering about who had perpetrated this misdeed. Even, looking back, she feels that he was slightly disappointed that it wasn't worse. He is the proud rescuer of his house, like a man who has restored his wife's honor.

A few minutes later this view seems somewhat unfair—or not entirely true. But as it retreats from her mind another, simpler thought enters, a single sentence: I cannot marry Roger, or his house.

Such simple but crucial sentences enter the minds of many of Adams' characters. "It was not until I was in the taxi, heading home from the airport, and thinking with foolish pleasure about my check for twenty-five dollars, that I realized that my notebook was in the missing suitcase, along with the stained robe and the other things I didn't much care about. And in that moment of understanding that my notebook could be gone forever, I did not see how I could go on with my life."

It is interesting, however, that in the strongest of the stories, "Snow" and "At the Beach," there is no such precipitating event. Instead, a group of characters is illuminated by almost casually interacting with each other. Nothing really happens in these stories, yet everything is revealed.

Alice Adams has a shrewd ear, as well as an accurate eye for the telling detail, the revealing though offhand remark. She is also skillful at using street names and descriptions of dress to do some of the work of character delineation. In fact small descriptive passages often are used to set up a whole mood of expectation, as in this paragraph from "At the Beach": 'The arrival of the elderly couple down at...