by Gail Godwin
"If you are an artist, you learn how to trap the yearning and put it where you want it, put it where it goes," says a character in this alluring novel. "That's the secret all true artists come to know." The power of yearning is a main theme of this story, which tells of a summer in the life of a 14-year-old girl when many of her illusions about life are shattered. Justin Stokes has just lost her father in an accident, and she, her 6-year-old brother and her mother move from Virginia to Upstate New York to live with an aunt. The adjustment from South to North, from an easy life to one with no money, is difficult. When Justin meets an exotic older woman, Ursula DeVane, the girl is ripe for an emotional attachment that will feed her imagination. DeVane, a local aristocrat, has a brother who is a pianist, and they represent culture in their small community. The summer with Ursula, which ends tragically, is one Justin can deal with only in retrospect many years later, when she has found some success as an actress. This novel, by the author of A Mother and Two Daughters, is made of the same stuff that fills hundreds of trashy romantic novels each year. Godwin far transcends the genre by virtue of her eye for details: the realization by the heroine's mother, for example, that when she cried after the death of a loved one, the real reason was because her husband had eaten the last drumstick of a wonderful fried chicken a neighbor had sent to her house. The Finishing School is a wonderful title, perfectly describing this gentle, ironic, intense and emotional fiction. (Viking, $16.95)
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