Lately, time seems to have taken on an amusing eternal quality. Outer-space time, quick-and-never; a slow wheeling of which Melinda, moving at whatever speed, is more and more aware she has been accorded the briefest, briefest slice. She finds herself now moonwalking through the strange region of not young, not a mother, not married, unlikely to marry. She will have to work until she dies. She will have good friends who'll keep an eye on her, of course; some of them women much like her. She will float toward and finally past the margins of sexual viability, and never have enough money for a facelift. In Boys Keep Being Born, Joan Frank's subject matter is stark; her style, wry and lyrical. Her characters ask point-blank questions of the lives in which, willingly or not, they find themselves. The answers they devise--or settle for--may surprise you.