Despite the countless thousands of words expended on the soul of the middle-aged Jewish male (now plumbed nearly to exhaustion), his generational counterpart, the middle-aged Jewish female, has languished in a fictional limbo…. [She's] the last invisible woman. Or was until Regina Glassman sprang full-grown from the pen of Leslie Epstein [in Regina].

Regina would be the first to admit that her obscurity isn't due just to insensitive novelists: she has passed most of her life in a somnambulistic stupor, from which she is only now beginning to awaken. And her monkey-in-the-middle-age dilemma exists in life as well as art; caught between the intense egocentrism of her incorrigible teenage sons and the blind selfishness of her mother's senility, she hardly has time to find herself. But she's determined to try….

With its many allusions to Chekhov, Regina is dense with symbolism; you can feel the weight of Epstein's...