In her first published book (1982), a study of John Updike's erotic fictional heroes, Elizabeth Tallent comments that "any rhythm is, at some level, an attempt to stave off uncertainty, to fortify oneself against those things in the world that are frighteningly arbitrary," which for Tallent, as for Updike, are the social and sexual arrangements between men and women. Tallent's fiction charts the tension between her characters' powerful needs for stability, security, and safety, and their equally powerful desires for risk, change, and flight. Equilibrium is impossible. "Convergence requires movement," Tallent observes, "the tenuous nearing, the precarious pulling apart." This movement, the rhythm of human need and desire, obviates conventional notions of plot: Tallent's stories frequently generate meaning through imagery rather than narrative event. As Andrea Barnett pointed out in her review of Tallent's first short-story collection, In Constant Flight (1983), Tallent's "quiet, elegiac stories are shaped less by plot...