Newfangled

Maidie Giddings Kramer Bonasso tries to improve her life by seeking new opportunities. At the same time, she's cynical about self-help theories. Instead she tries to improve her life by moving from state to state, job to job, from one circle of intimates to another.

After moving to Tucson, she reconsiders the past, including memories of the mother who's been missing since 1974; the two sisters who've stayed married to the same husbands for 15 years; the father she sees only sporadically; and the quirky, spiteful, loyal friends she's gained and lost. As Chief Curator of what was once called "The Museum of Domestic History and Home Economy," she again makes friends she can "slough off painlessly."

But Maidie ends up in an old neighborhood where the residents are related to each other and call out - overfamiliarly, she thinks - "We love you. Say hi to that nice boyfriend." A permanent setting. Familiar voices. These are reasons to stay - and to go. With her own two marriages begun in earnest and abandoned, with her training in sociology, Maidie starts to wonder whether momentum is the problem, not the solution.

Then, while at a conference in Oklahoma City, overlooking the paved-over site of the bombed office building, Maidie receives a phone call that propels her on yet another journey - geographic as well as psychic, into the past and the future. She learns that in the face of divorce and remarriage, perpetual detachment and re-annexing, we accept imperfect change to shore up the dilapidated and make it sturdy.