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With the boom in book clubs, cooking up a novel around six women who meet each month to examine literature -- and themselves -- seems like a recipe for success.
But ingredients alone aren't enough. Dinner with Anna Karenina is a meal to miss.
Less literary exercise than New York whine festival, the book depicts Manhattan apartment dwellers with permanent complaints.
Here the devil wears Prada -- and reads Louisa May Alcott. She joins a harried physician, an unfulfilled artist, a bitter guidance counselor, a frustrated academic and a discontented nutritionist.
Their men aren't much better, though I cheered silently for the guy who grumbled about his wife's "over analytical, self-pitying friends."
Are we supposed to like them? They don't even seem to like each other. These wooden characters speechify in stilted psychobabble and careen from anger to sadness to joy in a matter of minutes.
Though what we learn of their inner lives is confused and flat, their outward appearance is all too clear. Again and again, in painful detail, we hear they wear "a pale blue scarf that matched her pantsuit," or a "full skirted, jewel-necked black cashmere dress."
No law requires all nouns to carry adjectives, but you wouldn't know it here. On nearly every page, there is the stout Irish housekeeper, dog-eared book, wax-encrusted Chianti bottle, freshly brewed decaf or firm-fleshed gelatinous halibut steak -- none of which is germane to anything except overwriting.
Club meetings feature simplistic plot summaries and author bios. Readers are evidently not expected to know much about Nabokov, Plath, Wharton or Flaubert.
The result is a contemporary novel that reads like Cliffs Notes with plot. And the plot is a tired one -- a not-so-mysterious mystery dropped on the reader like a damp dish towel in the first chapter. What was the action that led otherwise perfect Cynthia to chuck her husband out the door?
This chick lit with literary pretensions is a gussied-up soap opera. Discussed books seem conveniently chosen to illustrate the club's angst of the month. (For wit and insight within the contrivance of a book group, better to seek out Karen Joy Fowler's 2004 The Jane Austen Book Club.)
Unfortunately, this overcooked Dinner has little to savor.
Dinner with Anna Karenina
By Gloria Goldreich
Mira, $21.95, 360 pp.
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