When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth.

Critics with appropriate expertise tend to carp at occupational subset novels because they never seem to get the details - about doctors, ballet dancers, cattle rustlers, or even nuclear cruiser crews - exactly right. Fernanda Eberstadt's art-world novel, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, gives no evidence of being an exception. Here's one of the characters describing - clearly through the author's own sensibilities - the folks at a party:

"The one with purple hair - writes for Konsept, her boyfriend used to do land art, now he's into neo-geo, he shows with Mary Boone. That's David Flaxman - he's a collector who's on Aurora's board. That's Joan Chavez, she's a sculptress, she works with found objects; that's my friend Joaquin, he used to have a gallery in the East Village, he was the first guy to show Basquiat. That's Celia Rubin, she's got a gallery on West Broadway, she was big in the seventies, she used to be married to Patrick Rubin. That's John Hanlon - oh my God, there's the Time's critic, I better go kiss her ass."

I mean, like, nobody goes from "land art" to neo-geo or uses the word "sculptress." But, hell, Thomas Mann didn't get the treatment of tuberculosis exactly right, either. More important is whether its world is at all plausible and its characters fascinatingly credible human beings. And according to these criteria, When the Sons of Heaven is the most wretched example of what they call "literary fiction" that I've come across since the comet before Hale-Bopp passed our way. How bad is Eberstadt's novel? Well, a long time ago, there was a very good dealer in Los Angeles named Riko Mizuno. One day, she told me she'd just been to visit the studio of a young artist, and she made a slightly sour face to accompany her words. "Was the work bad?" I asked. "Bad?" Riko replied. "You faint." I can almost envision Riko now, passed out cold in her easy chair, with a copy of When the Sons of Heaven open to about page 30, fallen at her feet.

The novel opens with its lens on Dolly Diehl, inheritor of a Chicago pharmaceutical fortune and the reins of the Aurora Foundation, a sort of more 'n' pop Dia. She's now Dollie Gebler, improbably married to Alfred, who's sinecured as the day-to-day manager of Aurora.

This star-crossed union, one of the novel's two plot pillars, is exemplary of Ms. Eberstadt's writing: she just bloody asserts things about characters as she needs them, without any semblance of how real human beings, not just fictional art-world Martians, think and act. Dolly, just out of Wellesley in the late '60s, goes up to a summer music colony and meets Alfred - a "gangly redhead in a not very clean seersucker suit, who laughed much too loud while telling dirty jokes," who makes fun of her for being a prig, admits he's a "groupie of the avant-garde," and wears crocodile shoes. He asks her out, and she's surprised to find herself accepting. (Her surprise pales beside my astonishment.) Dolly, inexplicably, continues to see this woefully unattractive loser "on the sly," lets him move in with her, and then marries him at city hall. Admitting she's become "the wife of a lower-middle-class Jew with no job prospects and no recognizeable talents," this WASP charmer realizes she's "chosen a husband she did not respect." Respect, reschmect - the marriage isn't remotely believable for a nanosecond.

Enter Issac Hooker, the title character from Eberstadt's favorably reviewed Issac and His Devils (which I did not read). In that novel, he was some sort of boy genius from backwoods New Hampshire who went off for a brief, Young Werther stint at Harvard and crashed emotionally. Now he turns up in New York as one of those William-Ingesque youthful Christ figures who enters the lives of a few misguided people and, through his sheer, shining, innocence-that-stays-innocence-no-matter-what, brings them some unwelcome but ultimately redeeming truth. [Bad overwriterly writing: "The next four months were a sad smear of strangers' sofas and floors."] Transient, poverty-stricken Issac turns up in a Henry Street Settlement drawing class and discovers that art is his true calling. Then he meets an old friend who steers him to a gofer job at Aurora. [More bad overwriterly writing: "He bent and picked up Issac's glasses, which had fallen in the scrimmage of reunion."]

The Geblers' marriage is on the rocks. Alfred's got a chick on the side - preposterously, a twentysomething punk-jock whose only reason for fictive existence is to justify Dolly's impending adultery with Issac. Issac shows Dolly his paintings. [Bad writing, Lady Chatterly division: "I guess you can handle them yourself, with your strong gardener's arms"; bad writing, sex-in-painting dept.: "the dark red mouth of her pussy, like a baby bird waiting for its worm." Memo to F.E. - worms are limp creatures. More bad dialogue: "'You said I couldn't paint like Titian,' he reminded her. 'Well, you can't - yet.'"] With Issac installed at the Geblers' country house,' Dolly leaves Alfred. ["Wanting only to get away from this man who'd shat on her, just as he'd shat on the Stella. . ."] Dolly finally screws Issac. ["The womb leaping, the womb leaping like a ram skipping over the hills."] Everything changes. ["The air was pregnant with the news of changing seasons."] But, as it turns out, nothing changes quite enough to keep Issac from going his way and Dolly going hers - back to Alfred and the same ol' same ol'.

Probably just as well. Issac and Dolly are a terminally boring couple. He's all self-consumed, breast-beating sensitivity and she's just an uninteresting neurotic rich lady. Alfred is a total schmuck, and every other character is TV-movie thin. Still, you may want to pick up this overdesigned book (an irritating transparent dust jacket whose lettering shadows, cast on the hardcover, are supposed to connote heaven coming down to Earth) for its trove of unintended guffaws. As for me, I think I'm going to faint.