Winning Chace

Four years ago, as a reporter on the computer industry for The Wall Street Journal, Susan Chace uncovered a fact worth pondering: her salary and her baby-sitter's were about the same, and the baby-sitter had the better job. While Chace spent her days sprinting around town asking "rude questions" about "this stuff I never understood anyway," the baby-sitter spent hers at the playground with Chace's child or entertaining friends in Chace's apartment, "sort of running this salon." Chace knew what she had to do: she fired the baby-sitter and quit her job. Which explains how, at the age of forty-one, she suddenly found herself sitting at home writing fiction.

This month, Random House releases Intimacy, a thin but sinewy novel about a woman reporter trying to come to terms with the men in her life: her husband, her ex-husband, her ex-husband's brother (with whom she had an affair), and her son, a glum kid with a ring through his nose. The novel ("It's fiction," Chace insists) began as a short story, which Chace showed to her husband, James Chace, a former editor at Foreign Affairs. With his encouragement, she sent the work to her agent, who in short order sold it to Random House. These days, Chace is hard at work on another novel, also for Random House, out next year. In the meantime, her perfectly pitched, well-paced prose makes Intimacy a welcome fiction debut from an exjournalist who never misses her beat.

JIM RASENBERGER