FICTION

THE FAVOURITE by Meredith Daneman (Knopf: $19; 163 pp.) There’s a new character in Frank’s comic strip, the one about his family, and straight away Rosalind knows. She doesn’t know she knows, but she knows. Wives always do. Frank is having an affair. Not that Rosalind is innocent of affairs. She grew up with them, back in Australia. Her father had them as regularly as a six-day clock; move out, then move back in. And now Frank. “It happens to everyone,” Rosalind tells herself. “It is life, for heaven’s sake, nothing personal. Except that it is personal, now that it’s happened to me. That is the trick of it: It happens every time for the first time; the blood and the astonishment are undimmed.”

There is an attempted suicide in “The Favourite,” and one that succeeds, and men--lanky, charming, handsome, engagingly helpless--are forever letting their women down, and their children. It is a wrenching book at times, beautifully done, and if you’re a man you should hang your head for even thinking about adultery. But “The Favourite” is no tear-jerker. Meredith Daneman has a way of setting scenes that leave you midway between a smile and a tear; a perception gentle and sardonic by turns. On her mother: “It’s not that she’s so beautiful. It’s just that for me her face is the original, the one on which my idea of faces is based.”

The ending is full of surprises, coming full circle and then some, in a novel that’s short, but far from slight.