A Lover's Almanac.

In her new novel, Maureen Howard moves far afield from the literary precincts of spirited Irish-Catholic women where she has made her mark. In this more youthful, futuristic venue, Howard's protagonists are a star-tossed couple, Louise (Lou, Lou-Lou) Moffett, an aspiring artist on the cusp of Downtown success, and her boyfriend Arthur (Artie) Freeman, a computer-graphics adept for a cyberspace ad agency. The opening scene is a fifties-style New Year's costume party, replete with tuna and taffeta, to greet the year 2000. Artie, who has sampled too many martinis, assaults two of the guests, including Louise's art dealer, and is unceremoniously hauled out of the apartment and hurled from Lou's life. The next two-thirds of the book is devoted to Artie's efforts to get himself back into Lou's good graces. The outcome is never in doubt. What we have here, as Howard readily acknowledges, is an extended lover's quarrel, hardly the stuff of millennial reckoning. So what is the author doing? Surely a novelist of Howard's heft (Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, Natural History) has something more up her sleeve than providing love-tipped arrows for Generation Y.

It turns out that the book's most captivating character is Arthur's grandfather, Cyril, who has brought up the fatherless boy from age eleven when his mercurial mother, Fiona, died in a boating accident. With Cyril, the son of a boozy Irish cop, himself a scholarship lad who married up and did well on Wall Street, we are back on Howard's home turf. It is Cyril's story, a life of accommodation to a loveless marriage and a meaningless career, with which the novelist seems most comfortable. We are beguiled when Sylvie, the widowed Cyril's bygone lover, appears after fifty years to rekindle the fires of a brief but memorable encounter. The other characters are interesting acquaintances; Cyril is an old friend who confides in the author more easily than the rest. It is his failures of nerve, their consequences, and Arthur's own efforts to break loose from their quiescent legacy that inform this parable on the downward pull of generations.

The plot reverberates between flashbacks to Cyril's could-have-beens and fastforwards to the young lovers' still-might-be's, all of it wound on the metaphorical spool of The Almanac. If our faults lie in ourselves, our stars certainly give us a nudge and the almanac provides a handy device for Howard to comment on our struggle to give free will room to maneuver within destiny. Interspersed throughout the novel are homilies, folk wisdom, weather forecasts, zodiac signs, auguries, factoids, advice, biographical sketches (Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton) and other commonplaces that have graced the genre from Poor Richard's debut (1733) to the perennial Farmer's Almanac which will serve as inspiration for Louise to turn the demons of her rustic past to artistic purpose. The design is clever but the results are mixed. After a while the adages and advisories become intrusive; whatever their symbolic quotient they are distracting and finally wearying.

More disquieting is the author's reversion to stereotype in evoking her minor characters. Arthur's false friend Bud Boyce is lampooned as an exploitive cyber hustler, a Bill Gates wannabee, and a lecher. Louise's dairy-farmer father, who conducts Strangelovian experiments in cow-cloning and who is variously referred to as the Mighty Milkman and The Big Cheese, is an ogre: insensitive, oppressive, malevolent; he does everything but intone fee, ti, fo, fum. A lapsed priest who writes popular spiritual tomes is a bopbag Deepak Gantry.

Also annoying is the use of overheated language. For whatever reason, Howard has chosen to use the conventions of Harlequin Romance to project modern angst. She announces her intentions early with Lou's anguish after the disastrous New Year's party: "And, having sworn off the man, she's into it again, choking back saltwater sorrow, for can it be that one night can unravel their years, one rotten night of Artie's misdemeanors. The answer is yes." And later, pining away: "...for she has neglected all her friends, imprisoned herself with the legend of her sorrow, her abandonment...and shame...." For someone with Howard's usually unerring ear, this time out she can't seem to resist a cliche: "Every day tells Louise Moffett this is the winter of her discontent"; or a bad pun - the cynical art dealer's "schlock of recognition."

But the real problem with the novel is that the key to its mystery - Artie's mother Fiona - is a wraith. The novel follows Arthur's quest to find the identity of his father. The trails leads to a failed Jesuit, Father Joe Murphy, now a harmless math teacher at a Catholic high school in Connecticut but once tapped for higher calling before he had an affair with Fiona in the charged East Village atmosphere of a revolutionary Catholic commune during the Vietnam era. Fiona was no mere ripe and randy flower-child but a charismatic presence with a deep moral dimension that stirred everyone she met. But we never learn why "they had all been in love with that redhead." In the novel it is simply a given, but we want more. Still, Fiona and Father Murphy, briefly sketched, are far more intriguing than Lou-Lou and Artie wholly rendered. Interestingly, the writing here is strong and spare, dispensing with the coy affectations that too often mar the novel.

Howard is too skillful an author to write a bad book, but she has not written a good one. What could have been a movable feast of the century is little more than a confection, a harmless enough souffle lightened by the occasional divertissement, but lacking the grit and grace of hard-earned lives that represent the author's best work.

Jack Schwartz's reviews have appeared in Commonweal, the Forward, and other publications.