The first-person narrator, although typical of the contemporary intellectual milieu, also successfully represents everywoman. Isadora White Wing was born "Weiss;" her parents were Jewish artists, entertainers and leftists of the 1930s who had, in the 1940s, Anglicized the name, gone into business, and started celebrating the winter solstice (with a tree in the house on December 25) and the vernal equinox (with decorated eggs and baskets).

Isadora marries a fellow graduate student of astounding intelligence (who became violently insane) and then an emotionless — but safe — Chinese psychiatrist, Bennett Wing. Details like these — specific, exaggerated enough to be funny, and yet also capable of generalization — allow Isadora to be seen as a sister by women of many backgrounds. In her own family, Randy, mother of nine children, who is married to an Arab and kept virtually in purdah, nicely represents society's ideal vision of maternity. Automatic...