[The main theme of "Perfect Happiness" is not] just the matter of bereavement, as experienced by her fiftyish heroine, Frances, who, when we first meet her, is "recollecting not in tranquility but in ripe howling grief her husband Steven dead now eight months two weeks one day." The theme is also how the past is changed by the present, the way time intersects with and refracts our feelings, the way the physical world around us can be both a "solace and a mockery." Weighty matters, these. But Mrs. Lively handles them with quiet wisdom, graceful goodheartedness and understated wit. Best of all, she firmly anchors them with an absorbing story and a group of vividly drawn, mostly likable and always affecting characters….

We also view deft variations on the theme of loss through Frances' adopted daughter Tabitha, suffering in the throes of her first love affair, and through...