Contract with the World, Jane Rule's fifth novel, begins where the education novel usually leaves off, with its characters newly launched into their various careers and relationships. It is tempting to think of the six main characters in this novel, like the six characters in Virginia Woolf's The Waves, as complementary parts of a composite human figure. They are all the same age. They are all, in one way or another, artists. And they are all intimately bound up in each other's lives as doubles, opposites, rivals, and lovers, both heterosexual and homosexual. The events of the novel, which extend over ten years and bring the characters to the age of thirty-five, involve them all in death and some at least in birth and rebirth.

The narrative of these ten years unfolds in a straightforward chronological way. But each of the book's six parts, as their titles indicate...