[In the following review, Emck lauds Gilchrist's novel Nora Jane and Company as “a sweet and enlightened novel in celebration of improbable love.”]

Ellen Gilchrist has written a sweet and enlightened novel in celebration of improbable love. Nora Jane and Company traces the randomness of human destiny in a story composed of brightly signposted coincidences, peppered with reflections on DNA and the vastness of the cosmos. “Nineteen ninety-five and we are still in orbit. Keep your fingers crossed”, says the prologue.

But this is a novel that is as interested in patterns as in randomness. Its most delightful characters are four girls between the ages of seven and eleven. Two are twins, born to the same mother but from the sperm of different fathers. Two are adopted girls from different families who act like twins. The improbable girl-pairs finally hook up, because their “mothers” are cousins. There is an inevitability about it all. We have a sense that what is most unlikely is most predestined. For a start, these characters, like other folk from Gilchrist’s books, are destined to have their lives carry on in further novels. The author plots multiple destinies with a deft mix of long-term vision and lightness of touch. And she is not averse to dropping hints about what is to come. Ellen Gilchrist is, above all, a good, old-fashioned story-teller.

The book’s heroine, Nora Jane, has featured in several of Gilchrist’s novels; most recently, The Age of Miracles (1995). She is a San Francisco mother with a beautiful singing voice; ex-counter culture, presently bourgeois, happily married to Freddy, a man fifteen years her senior, who delivered her, in an emergency, of babies he wasn’t sure were his own. The book opens with the couple contentedly making love in the afternoon, only for Nora Jane to leap out of bed on a freak intuition and rescue a small boy from drowning in their swimming-pool. It transpires that the child is the son of her former boyfriend Sandy, who is also father to one of Nora Jane’s twins. She and Freddy hurriedly move house to avoid a confrontation, and that is the last we hear of Sandy; for the duration of this novel, at least.

Gilchrist’s habit of picking up characters and then dropping them (with the intention, presumably, of returning to them several novels later) makes Nora Jane and Company rather episodic. The murder of a feminist author by Muslim fundamentalists is scarcely integrated into the larger pattern of the novel, and seems only to act as fodder for the characters’ musings on destiny and danger. But there are compensations for the loose weave of Gilchrist’s books, not least the fact that her characters are so articulate, thoughtful and witty, with a peculiarly West Coast lightness and sense of quest about them. When Nora Jane decides to take the university degree she never got a chance to take before, her husband and Nieman, her husband’s best friend, sign up too, so as to keep her company.

Nieman, chief film critic of the Bay area, gives up an illustrious career in order to catch up with the latest scientific thought. In doing so, the confirmed bachelor meets his future wife, a lecturer in biochemistry. With Californian know-how, they check in for an AIDS test on the day they meet, so they can sleep together that night. The novel ends in true comedic style with a wedding and intimations of magical providence.

Finally, however, it is Gilchrist’s children who steal the show. They are bright as buttons and provide the measure of the adults’ own capacities for the life fully lived. “The continents ride on the seas like patches of weeds in a marsh. Fortunately for us it all moves so slowly that we’ll be dead before it changes enough to matter”, says one of Nora Jane’s twins with wide-eyed wisdom. This is a creature who also says, “I’ve been waiting all my life to be a bridesmaid. I don’t care if it’s bourgeois or not. I think it’s the best.”