Almost Perfect - Hardcover

Adams, Alice

3.17

174 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679423982 ISBN 13: 9780679423980

Publisher: Knopf, 1993

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"[A] sharp, spare novel written by a wonderful, observant writer."
COSMOPOLITAN
Richard and Stella balance each other almost perfectly. Sometimes he drinks too much, gets too loud, or is too quick to anger. Stella also knows how generous he can be, too, but she begins to wonder if their violent fights and passionate reconciliations point to a deeper problem that Richard doesn't even suspect. There is something terribly wrong with the two of them together, even if everyone else thinks they are almost perfect....
From the Paperback edition.

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About the Author:

Alice Adams, born in Virginia and educated at Radcliffe College, is the author of ten highly praised novels. Her short stories have appeared in twenty-two O. Henry Award scollections and several volumes of Best American Short Stories. She has been the recipient of an Academy and Institute Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ms. Adams' other novels include Superior Women, a New York Times bestseller, and Medicine Men, both published by Washington Square Press. She lives in San Francisco.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The novels Adams writes, such as Superior Women (1984) and Caroline's Daughters (1991), are upholstered with mores: what people drink, eat, look at from windows, say at parties in well-educated Bay Area circles. But these cultural habits less reveal her fictional character than keep them stilled, fixed--and so, in this book, about a woman's love affair with an attractive man who goes over the edge into decrepitude and mental illness, Adams is, laudably, trying something slightly against her own grain. Stella Blake is a self-effacing journalist, just beginning to develop a reputation, when she meets Richard Fallon, a freelance designer and just about the most attractive, self-assured man she's ever known. How Richard would also be drawn to Stella's much mousier self is an odd magnetism Adams doesn't quite convincingly capture (maybe it's because Stella is half-Mexican, though Richard apparently is easily attracted to anybody, female or male)--but an affair does commence. During it, Richard often is ardent, caring, and generous--and also, in his dark side, unfaithful and unpredictable, given to odd outbursts and strange behaviors. Stella hangs in there, until Richard removes himself altogether. Meanwhile, Stella's San Francisco circle acts like a murmuring chorus, wondering what makes Richard tick. Adams, though, is no great psychologist as a novelist; a reader watches anguish but is not much slipped under the skin of it. Plus there's not enough narrative drive or drama here. Ambitious but finally tepid. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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