GILMORE GIRL

Jennifer Gilmore's boisterous debut novel, Golden Country (Scribner), offers a World's Fair-like, panoramic view of America from the 1920s to the 1960s, via the intertwined lives of three generations of Jewish immigrants, each seeking the goldene medina. Bonds are strained as family members pursue their destinies (for richer and poorer) as a Broadway producer, an actress, a gangster in the Prohibitionera underworld, a salesman concocting the first "2-in-l cleaner," and the inventor of the television. With a voice at turns wise and barbed with sharp humor, Gilmore warns: be careful what you wish for, the American Dream can sometimes be a nightmare.

E.S.