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MEDICINE MEN.<i> By Alice Adams</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 240 pp., $23</i>

<i> Francine Prose is the author of "Guided Tours of Hell" (Metropolitan Books)</i>

The heroine of “Medicine Men,” Alice Adams’ new novel, is the sort of woman whom this fine writer’s many fans have come to know and like and admire. The veteran of a series of problematic or unsatisfactory marriages and affairs, Molly Bonner, like many of Adams’ characters, has spent a certain portion of her inner life--and adult life--trying to reconcile the (pliant, submissive, polite, perpetually attentive and responsive to male desire and whim) Southern lady she was raised to be with the (intelligent, self-determined, independent by default, sustained more by friendship than by romance) San Francisco woman she has actually become.

In “Medicine Men,” this uneasy truce is subjected to the additional stress of a health crisis. A third of the way through the novel, Molly learns that the sinus headaches and nosebleeds that plague her are the symptoms of a malignant tumor, an aggressive cancer that has already reached the size of a golf ball. To make matters even trickier and more difficult--if such a thing were possible--Molly has recently become romantically involved with a generally well-meaning but bossy and unpleasant doctor, who is more than willing and eager to take over the management (and micro-management) of Molly’s case.

Meanwhile, Molly’s best friend, Felicia, is having her own troublesome and possibly life-threatening encounter with the medical profession: When her passionate, adulterous affair with a tyrannical, abusive surgeon comes close to ending, the doctor responds by beating and then stalking her, creeping around her house late at night and ritually urinating on the shrubbery.

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But any sort of plot summary of “Medicine Men” necessarily runs the risk of making the novel sound more grim and less fun than it turns out to be. What rescues the book from the swampy dangers of lugubriousness is Molly’s complex, reflective, innately plucky nature and, more important, the command of technique and tone that Adams has mastered over the course of a long and distinguished career that has included 13 previous books of fiction, most recently “Almost Perfect” and “A Southern Exposure.” From the first paragraphs of the novel, we’re reminded of what Adams does so well--how briskly, rapidly and with what seeming effortlessness she is able to convey large amounts of biographical, psychological and sociological information as well as physical description:

“For a long time, Molly Bonner’s strongest reaction to doctors was a fear that they would bore her to death. Seeing her come into their offices every year or so, and perceiving a visibly healthy (thin, clear-skinned, clear-eyed) youngish woman . . . they all began to talk. Molly had grown up in Richmond, Va., trained to listen to men and laugh at their jokes--true of all women, of course, but even more so if they are Southern. . . . The doctor who seemed the sanest . . . was a psychoanalyst, Dr. Edgar Shapiro whom Molly went to after the accidental death [in a helicopter crash] of her second husband, Paul West, a daredevil documentary filmmaker. For Molly, there was not only the shock and pain of Paul’s death . . . but there was also moral confusion. They had been on the edge of separating, and the death had left her rich.”

As usual, Adams shows her talent for describing everyday situations that are all too familiar to us but that we feel we’ve never seen rendered quite so accurately in words. No one could fail to recognize, and sympathize with, the progression (or regression) from relative confidence to hypochondriacal paranoia that Molly experiences when she’s kept waiting for 45 minutes in her doctor’s inhospitable examining room, a chilly, solitary place in which the lack of reading material almost invites one to pass the time by inventing horrendous, but compelling, fantasies of illness and catastrophe.

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In many ways, Adams’ novels seem traditional, even conventional; they’re easy to follow, written in clear, comprehensible sentences. But what one gradually realizes is that her fiction takes very specific, and characteristic, chances in matters of form and technique. Her highly recognizable narrative voice has a kind of brisk, airy freedom that permits it to skip around in time, to rocket us back into the past or to give us a sudden, startling glimpse--or overview--of the future. (“Nor, God knows, did she feel the sexual turn-on that doctors seemed to inspire in her beautiful friend, Felicia, who was for a long time involved with the famous heart surgeon, Dr. Raleigh Sanderson, although she was not exactly faithful to him--but that gets too far ahead of the story. . . . And then, for medical reasons, Molly was involved with a great many doctors all at once--and with another one in another way: he fell in love with her, obsessionally, angrily.”

Similarly, the novel navigates smoothly among multiple points of view, briefly exchanging Molly’s clear-sighted and bracingly sensible perspective for the rather more febrile and deluded musings of Felicia (“In all the years that she had been a medical secretary, she speculated, she could have gone to medical school; in this fantasy she ignored the fact that at no time did she even consider medical training. Besides, she next thought, I never wanted to be a doctor, I only wanted to have sex with doctors”) and the embittered, highly unattractive interior monologue of Felicia’s former lover, Sanderson. (“Were all women basically superficial and silly, after all? And, except for [sex] did he really not like them much?” )

Finally, one of the trademarks of Adams’ fiction, much in evidence here, is the ease with which it zips back and forth between interior and exterior spaces, thought and action, consciousness and response. We watch Molly’s good manners warring with her instinct and good sense when the widowed Dave Jacobs, her doctor-suitor, visits her home for the first time:

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“As he not too subtly inspected her living room, some wayward instinct informed Molly that he was weighing her as a possible replacement for Martha, checking out her taste and especially her housekeeping habits. She wanted to say, Look, in some ways you’re a very nice man, but you shouldn’t bother with me. It won’t work out. I am not meant for you, nor you for me. . . . But of course she said none of that, and only thanked him when he said how nice it all was.”

This command of texture and tone allows Adams to consider some fairly large issues (mortality, the craving for companionship versus the need for freedom) and to retain a civilized politesse while making some searing observations about men and male doctors. (The only female doctor who plays any sort of role in Molly’s treatment is a deferential radiologist who can barely speak, apparently out of fear of contradicting another physician.)

As have many clear-headed women, Adams’ heroines have always had more than slightly muddled, puzzled attitudes toward men and an endless quasi-anthropological fascination with the motives and reasons for their incomprehensible and unpredictable behavior. Doctors in “Medicine Men” seem rather like supermen, or alpha males, embodying everything that’s most alien, mystifying and appealing to the women they have contact with. (“She wondered if lots of doctors started out like that, smart little boys who liked to play doctor with little girls.”)

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“Medicine Men” also slyly suggests that certain women find male doctors attractive because of their ability to project authority and control, their arrogance and sense of entitlement, combined with a petulant self-indulgence that make them untrustworthy and even dangerous husbands and lovers. Here is Adams’ depiction of the way a certain sort of physician, “a large bluff man with the aggressively swaying walk of a football player--or a surgeon” greets his female patient, “as every doctor before him had said to her, in almost identical tones that mingled intelligent concern with condescension, “Well, young lady, what seems to be the trouble?”

“Medicine Men” never exactly breaks new ground; there’s nothing here to suggest that Adams’ work has turned some major corner or ventured off in some new or startling direction. But that is a great part of the book’s considerable appeal. Settling in to read an Alice Adams novel provides the satisfying expectations and comforts of sitting down with a cup of one’s favorite tea: something familiar, dependable, at once bracing and refreshing, gifted with a paradoxically sharp but gentle bite and a unique and unmistakably individual savor.

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