Cutters

Cutters

<DIV>All unhappy families are alike, to invert Tolstoy, but each happy family is happy in its own way. Although they live in a rambling white house in a midwestern town called Meadows, the Cutters are too irreducibly real to stand in for the average all-American family created by pollsters, popular magazines, and television sitcoms.<p>They compete for the reader's attention, pursuing happiness in human ways that have not changed since 1926, when <I>The Cutters</I> was first published. But it is Nell Cutter who best illustrates Bess Streeter Aldrich's strength in drawing memorable characters. Whether she is decorating the house on a budget for wealthy guests or testing child-raising theories or trying to make the daily loaf a little more yeasty, Nell Cutter is not afraid to ex-periment. She may go out on a limb, but it is seldom a dead one.</P></DIV>