[In the following review, Glass discusses the world Gilchrist creates in her fiction and asserts that the character of Rhoda is the dominating force behind Gilchrist's collection The Age of Miracles.]

Most fiction writers create in each of the stories they tell an autonomous world, filled with characters and settings that exist nowhere else. The various worlds they make may be neighborly, like planets in a single solar system, but each is unique. Ellen Gilchrist, however, delights in re-exploring the same world again and again. In nearly a dozen novels and story collections, Gilchrist has embroidered and reembroidered the lives of characters like Miss Crystal and Mr. Manny, an incompatible yet devoted New Orleans society couple; Traceleen, Miss Crystal’s adoring, circumspect maid; the Mannings and the Whittingtons, bourgeois Southern families full of dreamy rebels and hard-nosed tycoons.

Such familiars populate The Age of Miracles, but it is the irrepressibly scandalous Rhoda Manning who dominates the book; 8 of the 16 stories are hers. Rhoda, whom we met as a child in Victory over Japan, who married and became a mother in Net of Jewels, is now a divorced femme fatale on the wrong side of 50, a modestly successful writer and a grandmother several times over. As always, her adventures are brazen and self-indulgent, seedy yet oddly heroic.

Rhoda is struggling to hold onto youth, her very essence, without denying the obligations of motherhood or the affronts of aging (not that she doesn’t fail often). In “A Statue of Aphrodite,” an ostensibly chivalrous obstetrician falls in love with Rhoda after seeing her airbrushed likeness in the magazine Southern Living. She has her doubts but tries to temper them with reality, noting that when “a reasonably good-looking doctor who makes at least two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year hugs you by the elevator, you don’t forget it. You mull it, fantasize it, angelize it. Was it him? Was it me? Am I still cute or not? Could you get AIDS from a doctor? Maybe and maybe not. All that blood. All those C-sections on fourteen-year-old girls. There is always Nonoxynol-9 and condoms, not that anyone of my generation can take that seriously.” (Rhoda may be romantic, but she doesn’t mince words.)

When the doctor tries to cajole her into a Laura Ashley dress, to accompany him to his daughter’s wedding, Rhoda finds herself mired in family hysterics and midlife male neurosis. Rueful but nonchalant, her dignity resilient as ever, she extricates herself gamely.

In “A Wedding in Jackson,” she hot-rods from Fayetteville, Ark., to Jackson, Miss., to make a family wedding. Overdressed, without an escort, Rhoda ends up dancing with “every little girl at the party who looked like she needed someone to dance with.” She sheds outdated grudges and examines anew the foibles of her extended clan. When her 11-year-old grandson sulks because he does not like his mother’s new boyfriend, Rhoda takes him aside and talks to him with whimsical frankness:

“‘I’m going to send you a book about a man named Oedipus,’ I said. ‘It will explain the psychological ramifications of this problem. Call me up when you’ve read it and we’ll talk about it.’

“‘I don’t know what any of that means.’ He raised his head and looked at me. Gave me the full force of his gaze. … There is no barrier between him and the world. Not a membrane to separate him from all that burgeoning wonder, all the glorious and inglorious knowledge of our being.

“‘I will love you till I die,’ I said. ‘I love you more than anyone. You are the dearest thing on earth to me.’”

Rhoda’s musings on the quicksilver nature of youth are touching, but what makes “A Wedding in Jackson” so memorable has less to do with her rhapsodizing than with the reassurance she gives us that even the most emotionally worn, self-involved women may find joy and renewal in the endless chain of maternal love. It is an emphatically feminist story in the most intimate, uplifting sense.

These stories cover a broad spectrum of tone, from coy to forlorn. In “The Uninsured,” Rhoda becomes a garrulous pen pal to Blue Cross, Blue Shield. In “Joyce,” while taking an inspiring class on Ulysses, she has a voracious, loveless affair with a Vietnam vet who is searching in vain to give meaning to his war memories; though this tale is weaker than others here, Gilchrist’s portrayal of Rhoda as a postmodern Penelope is daring.

The Age of Miracles is not a collection in which every story sings, and one of its flaws is that Rhoda’s shadow envelops nearly every other character. Three stories told from the perspective of children grown wise before their time—“Among the Mourners,” “The Stucco House” and “The Blue House”—are engaging, but in the context of Rhoda’s recurring narrative, they are little more than genteel interludes. Like an overblown rose, Rhoda fills the book with a fragrance both heady and garish (and sometimes cloying, as in “Love of My Life,” a memoir of an affair that, for all its ardent extremes, seems unexceptional and too sentimentally rendered).

Not that she runs away with the show entirely. In two other wonderful stories, marrying fable and farce, Gilchrist lampoons the muddled morality of our times.

In “Madison at 69th, a Fable,” three grown children kidnap their mother and hold her hostage to prevent her from getting a face lift—a wholly original comedy that enfolds a dark tangle of fears and betrayed obligations.

The conflict between Edwina Standfield’s desperation to buy back youth and her children’s imperialist arrogance is rife with irony.

“I am fifty-nine years old,” Edwina pleads. “I don’t have long enough to live to go saving myself a little pain and discomfort. I want to have this done. I’m having this cone.”

“It’s a new world,” her son says later. “People don’t get what they think they ought to have. They have to think up new things to want.”

How the tables have turned: the older generation pleading for novelty, the younger generation scorning change.

“The Divorce” is similarly rich. In this computer-age fairy tale, a jilted husband buries his sorrow by opening an espresso cafe in a dull Midwestern town, an asthmatic little girl becomes a gifted trumpeter and an upright citizen puts herself in contempt of court by calling a spade a spade. And love, however pragmatically, conquers all.

If there is a unifying theme in this collection, it lies in the outlook of the various protagonists, nearly all of them past or yet to enter what we call the prime of life. In those before-and-after years—one an age of yearning, the other of reckoning—we take the least for granted and so, Gilchrist suggests, are most capable of recognizing miracles. We do not yet know the random cruelty of love, or we know it all too well.

“I’m a Celt,” says Rhoda. “I pile up stones and keep a loaded pistol in my underwear drawer. My ancestors painted themselves blue and impaled each other on oak staves. I can’t stand tyranny. From the world outside or the tyranny of the heart.”

Like Rhoda, Ellen Gilchrist is an Attila of a romantic who, as a Southerner, a woman and a poet, chooses her weapons from a well-stocked arsenal. In The Age of Miracles she continues the fight with shrewd, unstinting passion.