‘Lillian on Life’

By Alison Jean Lester. Putnam, 240 pp., $25.95.

Lillian is a free spirit who doesn’t worry about “what someone might call moral things,” such as her penchant for married men.

“So many people say that everything happens for a reason,” she muses. “I’ve always felt that things happen because the things before them happen, that’s all.”

Part Colette, part Erica Jong, Lillian is quickwitted and sharp: “I wonder if beauty has a dual purpose. No. It has no purpose, and offers no guarantees. In my experience, beauty merely has a dual result: one, lots of people talk to you; two, nice photographs.”

Reflecting on the forces that shaped her, Lillian describes a cold and distant mother who, when Lillian brings home a potential husband, comments: “It would be kind of him to marry you.” Her father, on the other hand, comes off as warm and handsome, “a charming Midwestern man.” In college at Vassar, Lillian is besotted by the toddlers she works with in her early-education course — “Their hands gave me goosebumps” — but as much as she wants a child, she never has one of her own.

As time passes, lovers die and Lillian’s parents pass away. “I feel like I’m dissolving. Or dispersing,” Lillian says. “I’m a dandelion and my fluff is gone, carried away on the slipstream of the people who’ve left.”

But readers who have spent the last 200 pages enjoying the company of this endearingly formidable woman know she will get her fluff — as well as her moxie — back. Eugenia Zukerman wrote this review for the Washington Post Book World.