ANIMAL HUSBANDRY

There's a type of American literary subgenre that emerged with the Boomer middle class, a safe, simpering smallness most often encountered in Little Magazines. You know--stories in which nothing much happens, usually to an impressionable youth, in a bucolic setting. At their best, these writings gently massage the heart. On this tape, such a story comes to us in an urban environment. A jilted yuppie woman finds an animal metaphor to explain the perfidy of fickle males and uses it to exact her revenge. The satire is on the level of the comic strip "Cathy"--at least as interpreted by the cloying Chelsea Adams in this abridgment. While the author seems to be striving toward a satire of sexual politics of the Nora Ephron school, her humor has no bite, the characters no character. Adams is amusing enough, but one wonders if the heroine and her friends are meant to sound so wishy-washy. Y.R. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: MAR/APR 98]