[The title character of Cora Fry] is a young wife with two children named Nan and Chip, and a husband she thinks of as Fry. No first name. Not that she doesn't love him, but well, she doesn't trust him yet, and she feels trapped in her marriage….

Cora lives in rural New Hampshire. She has always lived there, and she is growing vaguely restless. Watching the lives of others on TV has fed her uneasy wants….

What Cora wants for Cora is what Greta Garbo always said she wanted, it's "luscious freedom / it's not to be needed. To be just alone…."

But the luscious freedom to be alone is not for Cora. When her husband, Fry, takes a night's shore leave from marriage. Cora tries to escape. She moves out. She wrecks her car. She takes the children on the bus to Boston. Then, her anger vented, she returns home. To her worried, welcoming Fry, who "sat still / and worried / swayed in the tidal pull / that brought me home / and still could drown us all."

That tidal pull is what this stream-of-consciousness poem/novel is all about. The tidal pull of the seasons, the sexes, the social norms. Poet Rosellen Brown here pays homage to the ambiguous ties of home and family. Caught in the annual round of gardening, preserving, caring for her husband and children, Cora Fry longs to break loose, envies the muskrat who gnaws himself free from the trap, but cannot emulate him.

Cora, Ms. Brown seems to be saying, is New England to the core. Honest, frank, unromantic, tradition-bound, good. No Anna Karenina she, to spoil her life in pursuit of passion. No Emma Bovary, no Hedda Gabler, no histrionics, only quiet desperation. Even desperation sounds too dramatic. Quiet acceptance.

She's sound as an apple, Cora is, and in consequence, her inner monologue is often prosaic. One can't wax very poetic over putting away the children's rubber boots. Still, Cora has her moments, and it is Rosellen Brown's creative intuition to let us see that deep down inside, like all apples, Cora hides a star.