lan Shapiro has received numerous awards for his poetry. He has been showered with prizes for his two memoirs, as well. He has a day job as a professor. And now — is he going for a literary grand slam? — he has written a novel in the shape of a play.

A fine novel it is. "Fine" as in careful, precise and contained, as well as fine as in good. "Broadway Baby" is directly, plainly told, with the economy of poetry but without allusive opacity.

It is a simple story, really. The plot follows the unremarkable yet notable life of Miriam Blue­stein. The book opens with Miriam's childhood. Born to a middle-class Jewish mother who, distracted, divorced and busy running a clothing store, sends Miriam to live with grandparents.

Miriam grows up enthralled by theater and fantasizes about a career on the stage. A woman of her time, though, she gets married first. It is the 1950s. She has children. Her marriage becomes a partnership without passion.

She never manages to get on stage, but one of the children is a talented singer, so Miriam becomes a stage mother, and for a while works at the studio that trains her son, Ethan. Ethan flails, though, and her other two children similarly refuse to fulfill Miriam's wishes for them. (One of them grows up to become a poet.) Miriam needs to keep up appearances — to act — always. "Nothing scared her more than shame and embarrassment." As if to ignite this exact fear, children and aging parents keep wetting their beds. She gets old, moves into a retirement home.

Nothing remarkable, this life. But by making it into a story — by writing a novel — Shapiro introduces us to a woman many of us have met but few of us have read about. And that is what makes the book extraordinary.

Star Tribune, Star Tribune
Alan Shapiro, author

Shapiro's poetic bent is evident in the economy of the prose and in the novel's formal structure. Describing a photograph, he writes, "In the moment of the picture, they are what they pretend to be," and with that one short clause captures what would take a lesser writer chapters.

The book is structured as if a play, divided into acts and scenes. In the one-paragraph-long Act Two, Scene Five, he sums up, devastatingly briefly, a daughter's betrayal.

The difference between novels and plays lies in the way interior consciousness is depicted. Plays do not take us inside characters' heads; novels do. In this novel-as-play, we get few glimpses into Miriam's interior life. That is because she does not have much of one. Remembering her husband, Miriam recalls to herself, "He was something on the dance floor, smooth and confident, a Jewish Fred Astaire." The internal, for Miriam, is always exteriorized. Like a character on the stage.

Anne Trubek is the author of "A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses."