SNAKE.<i> By Kate Jennings</i> .<i> Ecco: 157 pp., $21</i>

Not only is the unexamined life not worth living, but it can be toxic to all who come into its range. In Kate Jennings’ novel, “Snake,” the rebellious and man-crazy Irene marries the laconic Rex and settles with him on a farm in the remote Australian countryside. While Rex finds farm work deeply satisfying, Irene grows proportionately frustrated and enraged. She bears children; Girlie, to whom she is indifferent, and Boy, with whom she is overly familiar. Irene takes up sewing and canning and becomes a fanatical gardener. “Unlike people,” she lectures her children, “flowers never disappoint.” “There was never any one day when Irene took in the details of her life and formulated the thought, I want to be somewhere else,” Jennings writes. Instead, her wildly shifting moods fill the house, intimidating her children, punishing her baffled husband. In attempts to remedy her unhappiness, she moves on to infidelities, a job, classical music, poetry, unlikely friends. But nothing sweetens Irene, who nurses the injustice of her dull life “like a dog with a piece of hide.” Like the snakes Girlie imagines “slithering up drainpipes, sliding through knotholes, into the house,” Irene’s rage lashes out indiscriminately, instinctively. The chapters in “Snake” are short, vivid bursts of imagery, anecdote, insight. Chapter titles, fashioned from poems, songs and slang, often bear only an oblique, provocative relation to the paragraphs that follow them (“Send My Roots Rain,” “Dipping His Wick”). It’s hard to believe a full-blown family tragedy can be told so wholly and well in such small, deft snatches, but then rarely has a poet’s skill at compaction been put to better use in prose. You can easily read the entire book in one sitting--and only upon standing be struck by how much pity and terror you’ve consumed.