In Her Shoes

One is pretty and the other plain, but both struggle to heal the rift between them.

A TALE OF TWO SISTERS

A Novel

By Anna Maxted

Dutton. 356 pp. $24.95

The British writer Anna Maxted has published five books in roughly six years, with three of them -- Getting Over It , Running in Heels and Behaving Like Adults -- landing on international bestseller lists. Her latest novel, A Tale of Two Sisters , seems likely to advance her success, as well as her franchise. Maxted's protagonists tend to be familiar chick-lit types -- hapless, harried career gals who hold down madcap jobs and wrestle with relationships, and now procreation, amid a surfeit of exclamation points. Her narratives are wrapped around topical themes, resulting in novels that read like some hybrid of "Sex and the City" and an hour with Dr. Phil.

Maxted has previously tackled such subjects as rape, intimacy and eating disorders; her new novel relates, in alternating first-person voices, the saga of two sisters and the painful matters of miscarriage and adoption. Lizbet, the first to become pregnant, is the more earthy of the pair, with a chaotic but lively household and a seemingly stable relationship. The posh and fastidious Cassie is a successful and ruthless divorce lawyer who drives a Mercedes and requires passengers to remove their shoes before climbing in. The announcement of Lizbet's pregnancy coincides with Cassie's decision to confront the unresolved issues of her own adoption, and therein lies the plot, such as it is.

Maxted is a terrific writer with a droll comedic voice. She excels at creating vivid, believable protagonists, and even her minor characters are full of life, such as the eccentric assortment of relatives who gather on Friday nights for Shabbat dinners. When Lizbet's mother obliviously offends their more religious in-laws by serving cream-of-chicken soup at dinner, Lizbet quips, "Even half-arsed Jews like us didn't tend to eat meat and dairy produce in the same meal. Even our parents' neighbor, Letty Jackson, who kept a kosher home but ate bacon sandwiches in her car (it was a Saab -- I think she thought it neutral territory, like Sweden), drew the line at adding butter."

Lizbet's emotional tailspin after a miscarriage drives much of the narrative, and anyone who has lost a baby is likely to appreciate her poignant reaction. "My moron body still thought it was pregnant -- it mocked me with two blue lines on the test I did, after. I felt empty -- because I was. Like one of those cheap hollow chocolate eggs, what were they called, Kinder Surprise. Surprise, your kinder's dead." But well-drawn characters like Lizbet are trapped here inside a story where too much of the action hinges on misread signals and the frustrating inability of otherwise articulate people to express themselves.

The formulaic plot may be beside the point, though, since enjoyment of this book is likely to have more to do with one's reaction to the words "chick lit" than with literary construction. There seems to be an endless "whither chick lit" debate in blogs and on the pages of book reviews lately. Is the genre dead or alive, and is it an embarrassment to be caught on the subway engaged in a light read? A borderline contentious exchange on a recent Wall Street Journal blog, sparked by a discussion of Emily Giffin's bestseller Baby Proof , had career women bickering about their reading habits, with one participant arguing defensively that her 60-hour-a-week job entitled her to digest some "mind candy." Meanwhile, Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times this summer, declared that chick lit "appears to be in its death throes," although an article in the same newspaper exactly three months earlier had reported on its increasing global appeal.

Not yet out of her thirties, Maxted seems to be evolving stylistically, with this effort being sharper and more emotionally complex than the early books that established her name. Already something of a grand dame of the genre, she probably doesn't waste much time fretting about the musings of industry trend spotters, or the sorts of labels that are slapped on her books. ·

Susan Coll's third novel, "Acceptance," will be published next March.