Righteous Anger 
 This is a book that made me angry towards the end, but it was appropriate anger. What starts as a rather light-hearted novel about young writers and artists in Greenwich Village in the late fifties eventually turns dark. Slowly, you are reminded that this was not merely a locus of beatnik sensibilities and creative freedom, but also a period of intolerance and prejudice, racial, sexual, and sexist. As your hopes of a storybook ending fade, you have to acknowledge the truth in it, the fidelity to period and consistency of character. Suzanne Rindell does not take the easy way out. 
 She certainly has chops. In her previous novel, 
 The Other Typist 
 , which captured an earlier period with equal skill, she achieved the particular feat of writing through the eyes of a naive secretary who understands only a fraction of the world in which she finds herself--until you begin to wonder if she understands a lot more than she would have you think. Something of the same is found in one of the three narrators of this book, Eden Katz, a young liberal arts graduate from Indiana who comes to New York hoping to make it in the world of publishing. Hers is a lovely, fresh character, and it is fascinating to make the journey from seeing her being manipulated, and then deceived, to finally learning how to stand up for herself by a bit of deception of her own. 
 I admit that it gave me pause to hear that the book would feature a number of struggling writers among its characters; young writers writing about the difficulties of writing seldom makes for interesting reading. But the first of these characters you meet, a Columbia dropout named Cliff, has at least got an infectious voice, as though Rindell had a direct pipeline to the late JD Salinger. You soon realize that he is all dreams and no substance, but the third narrator, Miles Tillman, a writer who actually completed his Columbia degree, is the genuine article. One of the things that Rindell does well--and it is far from easy--is to convince us that Miles has talent, without ever needing to quote his work. Miles is African American, living in Harlem with his mother, kid brother, and an abusive stepfather. He is accepted in the Village, but has his own battles to fight elsewhere. If he soon becomes the most interesting character of the three, it is because of all the narrators, he has the most to discover about himself and his family. 
 One difference between this and Rindell's previous novel is that it is half as long again. The Byzantine plotting of a 350-page book is harder to sustain at 500 pages, especially when the structure seems to be that of three separate stories. Indeed, when Miles goes out to San Francisco in the middle of the book, the stories of Cliff and Eden have a hard time competing. But Miles returns and the last part of the novel entwines all three stories in a way that plays havoc with the emotions -- though only if you can accept at least one major implausibility.. 
 At the very end, Rindell jumps forward 22 years to show all three characters in an epilogue. I thought of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, another dark comedy that turns almost to tragedy, and needs the passage of a generation to redeem itself. Rindell's mere 17 pages are really too few to settle everything fully, and I could still feel my anger simmering. But she comes up with a gorgeous final sentence that persuaded me to round my 3.5 stars up rather than down.