woman visits her ex-husband and his younger wife and realizes with a mixture of fascination and dismay how her former husband has been physically and psychologically debilitated by his new marriage. The characters from her early prize-winning novel, Rough Strife , reappear in middle-age, facing a life-threatening crisis. Schwartz's characters, presented with her impeccable style, reflect her many decades of accumulating wisdom and her sharp perspective. Contemplating the past, one of her characters muses, ?Memory is so prone to digression. To sustain a logical or chronological sequence, we must keep dragging our minds off their natural course, like a cowboy tugging on a calf with a rope around its neck who wants to run off into the fields.? With this sort of nuanced thinking, Schwartz's fiction brings an original and piquant angle of intelligence to the matter of how to navigate our complex lives.