Rameau's niece

by Cathleen Schine

"This witty companion to Rameau's Nephew, Diderot's light-footed masterpiece, traces the vagaries of a young woman's life as it begins to duplicate the surprising gyrations of an eighteenth-century lascivious novel she has uncovered. Along the path of temptation, love, lust, folly, and reconciliation through the sophisticated labyrinth of contemporary Manhattan, we join this delightful young Candida on her cockeyed quest for truth." "Margaret Nathan is the scholarly though mortifyingly forgetful author of The Anatomy of Madame de Montigny, an unlikely best seller celebrated by feminists and by deconstructionists, and soon to be a television movie. Happily married to a benevolently egotistical Columbia professor, Margaret seems blessed - until she finds herself seduced by the libertine novel she has discovered in the library. Thus begins a series of amorous contretemps that plunge Margaret into the maelstrom of contemporary sexual practice, until she is washed up panting on the farther