Excerpt from A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Two interior journeys softened this letdown, if only mildly. The first was a novel called The Arrangement, by Elia Kazan, a steamy story of a love triangle that I bought one summer at the corner drugstore. The other expedition began when I read a short story in The Saturday Evening Post, slightly racy and deep, about the sexual awakening and ultimate downfall of a young woman named Lucy Nelson. It was excerpted from a novel to be published the next year, in 1967, and it had been written by a man named Philip Roth. I had never heard of him, though from what I could tell, a lot of people had. What I knew was that he followed Lucy's chaotic despair toward its natural end; more impressive, he had given his novel the wistful, ironic title of When She Was Good. Partly because I was determined not to be, I asked for the book for Christmas. And whether they knew or intuited it, my parents seemed to realize that I had turned a corner with this particular book, and that my path might be veering in a dangerous direction. That, say, the author of Goodbye, Columbus might be excavating caverns far more threatening than those of either war or evolution, at least to a teenage girl on the prowl, armed with her Marlboros and her driver's license and her long white nails. And then I met Travis.

Excerpted from A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell Copyright © 2006 by Gail Caldwell. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.