QUENTINS
Maeve Binchy
Dutton
Fiction
ISBN: 0525946829

Seven or eight years ago, on a winter vacation with my mother, I spent the plane trip and most of the first day buried in Maeve Binchy's novel THE GLASS LAKE. Then I passed it on --- a bit warily, for Mom preferred smart, unsentimental, uncommercial books. "It's not great literature," I said, "but you might like it." The next morning, looking tired, teary, and immensely gratified, she gave it back. She had stayed up all night reading.

That's the effect Binchy seems to have on people --- millions of them. It would be easy to slap her work with such dismissive labels as "airplane reading" or "women's novels." Certainly the books --- QUENTINS is her thirteenth --- are touching and warm, with few surprises and plenty of irresistible, vulnerable, heart-in-the-right-place characters (as well as some really obnoxious snobs and villains). But they are also tough and intelligent and feminist, with a lilting, very Irish sense of language and a no-bullshit attitude toward life. (This side of Binchy's writing reflects her personal favorites, a list that includes such unexpected names as William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, Kurt Vonnegut, and Elmore Leonard.)

Binchy's latest is the story of Quentins, a posh Dublin restaurant that has already made cameo appearances in her other novels; it features a winsome, intrepid heroine, Ella Brady, whose affair with a married lover and its aftermath provides most of the action. But the plot isn't awfully important here. The main thing is the emotional generosity of the people. Some of them are old friends from earlier books like SCARLET FEATHER, TARA ROAD and EVENING CLASS (and if this gives the book the feeling of a high-class soap opera, who cares?). Others are new acquaintances --- like Quentin Barry, who is rescued, Cinderella-like, from obscurity and starts his own restaurant; Brenda and Patrick Brennan, who run it for him; and Patrick's younger brother Blouse, whose evolution from shy, "slow" kid to family man, organic-vegetable expert, and all-around mensch made me cry. Quentins itself, though, is the real protagonist, the link that holds everything together: "There was no other job quite as interesting," the staff agrees one day, "as watching the human race at feeding time."

Someone once called Binchy a "quiet feminist," and I agree with that assessment --- it's probably a major reason that women of all sorts are drawn to her books. Her female characters are staunch rather than furious, weary realists more than role-models, and eventually most of them (the good ones, anyway) find love, but there are a lot of bumps and betrayals along the way. In QUENTINS, Mon, an Australian waitress, makes no secret of "her unerring bad taste in men and how she had lost her heart and all her savings to a fellow in Italy." Ella and her friend Deirdre are sympathetic: "It was pretty much a global problem. Men were the cause of most of the unrest and unease on the planet."

Such priceless lines aside, I didn't find QUENTINS quite as compelling as some of Binchy's other books, mostly because it is a bit of a pastiche: Once Ella's predicament has been established and the history of the restaurant recounted (the two converge when Ella comes up with the idea of making a documentary film about Quentins), Binchy stops the action dead and diverts the novel into a series of tales that have the flimsiest relationship to the main plot. The stories are all set in the restaurant, and they're supposed to be part of Ella's pitch to a foundation she's asking to underwrite the film, but this is a pretty clunky plot device for a woman who is usually a whiz at narrative.

QUENTINS isn't exactly suspenseful, either: We know Ella is deceiving herself about the married boyfriend way before she does; we know which guy she'll end up with many pages before it happens. The amazing thing is that despite the leisurely pace and telegraphed clues, you still want to keep reading and reading and reading. These characters, after only a couple of hours, already feel like family. You care desperately about what happens to them.

QUENTINS wasn't even supposed to exist. Two years ago, Binchy announced she was retiring; SCARLET FEATHER would be her last novel. Legions of ardent fans ---and I'm one of them --- are very glad that she changed her mind. When you've got a book like this to come home to, the world is a warmer place.

   --- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

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