BOOK REVIEW : A Two-Dimensional View of the Big Story : SECRET ANNIVERSARIES<i> by Scott Spencer</i> Alfred A. Knopf $18.95, 304 pages

In life, it is the rare man who will look over a group of women and announce: “I’ll take the funny-looking one with the buck teeth and the high IQ.” But in fiction, it is often spirit, not beauty, that makes an impression. Jane Eyre is the original plain Jane. Elizabeth Bennet of “Pride and Prejudice” captures Mr. Darcy’s heart not with her limpid eyes and cellulite-less thighs, but with her humor, vivacity and intelligence. We may recall “Gone With the Wind” with an image of Vivien Leigh, but the first words of that novel are explicit: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful . . . “

Caitlin Van Fleet, the protagonist of Scott Spencer’s new novel, is gorgeous. So right away, the reader thinks: This must be one special woman. After all, Spencer, the author of several well-received works of fiction, including “Endless Love,” is no pap novelist, spinning out flawless, high-cheekboned, heavy-bosomed, cotton-candy heroines. There must be a reason for creating a beauty, endowing her with high intelligence, and then making her contemptuous of her own loveliness.

The reason, it would appear from its elements, is that “Secret Anniversaries” is a Big Novel, one with a grand historical sweep that contemplates war, peace, prejudice, social class and sexual mores from the point of view of one of the best, brightest and, yes, most beautiful of its citizens, its Uberfraulein .

Spencer begins by placing his 1940 working-class beauty-with-a-brain, a reader of “Wuthering Heights” and “War and Peace,” the daughter of an estate manager and a housemaid, in a town 100 miles from New York City that seems to be populated almost exclusively by snobs, Nazi sympathizers and their servants.

Caitlin is caught in bed with the sleekly superficial Jamey Fleming, the son of her parents’ wealthy, pompous employers. To get her out of the way, the Flemings pack her off to Washington to work for Congressman Stowe, a die-hard isolationist who keeps bad company. He lunches not only with the anti-Semitic Father Coughlin, but with the evil John Coleman, a German agent.

In Washington, one of the congressman’s aides, Betty Sinclair, takes Caitlin under her wing. Well, more than under her wing. Under her covers. The boy of Caitlin’s dreams turns out to be a girl. However, their love does not last long. The demonic Coleman, realizing that Stowe may no longer be under his thumb, and, in fact, may be about to come clean about German influence in the U.S. government, “arranges” a plane crash that kills not only the congressman, but Betty.

“Secret Anniversaries” has its strengths. There have been many novels about ordinary Americans confronting extraordinary events during World War II, but relatively few about this prewar period. The author seems to have done his homework. He uses both actual historical figures (Coughlin and Sumner Welles, for example) as well as his own characters to write about isolationism in all its guises, from blatant Nazism with its concurrent anti-Semitism to simple selfishness--the uncharitable refusal on the part of many Americans to help their fellow human beings--to the apparently sincere belief that the war in Europe was a European problem.

And as he showed in “Endless Love,” Spencer can write about sex in a manner that is both elegant and explicit. The occasional scenes of coupling in “Secret Anniversaries” are well-crafted, although occasionally too self-consciously literary: “Something within her felt as if it were growing immense and falling into pieces at the same time. The drunkenness burned off her, flambeaued by lust.”

But there isn’t enough sex and politics in this novel to inflame the reader’s interest. In fact, there isn’t enough of anything. For a book that spans decades, that purports to deal with a variety of issues such as war, social mobility, treason, homosexuality and single motherhood, there is very little texture. This is a Big Novel for minimalists.

Something else is missing from this novel, too: coherence. “Secret Anniversaries” jumps from 1940 to 1941 to 1929 to 1933 to 1967. This is unfortunate. There is a good reason for Once Upon a Time. A good story, like life itself, unfolds naturally. The reader comes to know the characters’ lives, understand them, care about them. Now and then, authors break the unwritten Rule of Chronology. They twist time. They try to negate it, or emphasize its power. A few gifted ones succeed: Lawrence Sterne has Tristram Shandy observe his own conception; John Fowles offers a modern voice to illuminate a Victorian novel in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”; Kurt Vonnegut lets Billy Pilgrim travel through time in “Slaughterhouse Five.” But these writers have sound artistic reasons for breaking the laws both of conventional literature and of nature.

So here is Caitlin, an intelligent and beautiful woman who has left a narrow-minded small town for a chance to change the world--or at least watch it change--and she is monumentally uninteresting.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “That Place in Minnesota: Changing Lives, Saving Lives” by Ed Fitzgerald (Viking).