Lizzie Reade has just graduated from Harvard, where for four years she didn't do a lick of work due to falling for depressed guys - she used to fall in love whenever she visited her brother at the local mental hospital. Now at twenty-three, she interviews for a typing job at WPRV, the public television station in Boston, where the sight of men wandering the hallways in rumpled hair and blue workshirts fills her with waves of emotion.

The only problem is that whenever Lizzie gets near an electric typewriter, semicolons appear out of nowhere. "It; is; go;;od to; work; hard;;" she pounds out at record speed on the typing test. Luckily WPRV is so liberal that she gets the job anyway, and soon she gravitates to the cafeteria, where the intense looks between couples discussing racism or gingerroot weight the air with a sexual promise you could cut with a knife.

Unfortunately the only time she makes an impression is the day she puts her hardboiled egg in the microwave to warm and presses the button marked "dinner." (It's amazing, really, how many particles one little egg can explode into; it almost makes her believe in atoms.). All Lizzie wants is to get married. In a few months she has four meaningful relationships. And then she meets . . .

Roger Stoner, "a man who mixed his pleasure with pleasure," to quote his high school yearbook, is thirty and no longer drives a GTO or tells girls he loves them to get them into bed. Of course in 1974, it's no longer necessary to tell women you love them to get them into bed, particularly if you are a producer at a liberal public television station, where it's considered dishonest not to sleep with someone of the opposite sex.

Women come to him in the darkness of editing rooms or at friends' houses on the Cape, where there aren't enough beds to go around. Roger has always assumed, however vaguely, that he will get married someday. Everybody gets married. Still, once or twice in the past year, he's wondered, in the detached manner that settles upon him after the first six-pack, if maybe there is something a little wrong with him that he has never fallen in love.

1. And then, at a drunken summer party, after watching her try to sit down on top of a pruned hedge, he meets Lizzie Reade. A comedy of manners and a wry, subtle portrait of the ways we fall in and out of love and back again, The Year Roger Wasn't Well is outrageously funny, moving, and unnervingly true to the ambivalence that is at the heart of any real romance. It affirms Sarah Payne Stuart's promise as one of the funniest and most talented writers of her generation.