Emma Bovary at the beach

Greta, one of three vivid and endearing women in Cathleen Schine’s new novel, finds herself at ground zero of a midlife crisis in the opening pages of “She Is Me.” She is a 53-year-old landscape designer whose home in Rustic Canyon is the focus of all that restless nervous energy, and she currently favors an abundance of roses, heather and lavender in her own garden: “Santa-Monica-on-Thames” is how Schine describes it. Nothing in her all-too-familiar predicament, however, allows us to guess at the odd bounce her life is about to take.

Greta’s mother, Lotte, is aging and ailing, an old lady whose charming eccentricities evaporate when she falls into crying jags “as exaggerated as Lucy Ricardo’s, as loud as thunder, as eery as lightning.” Her daughter, Elizabeth, is struggling to cope with the burdens of raising a toddler, the tensions of the tenure track and the temptations of a movie mogul who encourages her to abandon her East Coast teaching job and reinvent herself as a screenwriter by updating “Madame Bovary.”

“Your mother is very old,” Greta tells herself. “Pretend she is a child. Just like your child, your highly competent, adult, big horse of a child sitting at the kitchen table biting her fingernails and spitting them on the floor.”

Caught between a needy mother under treatment for cancer and a cranky daughter, Greta is herself diagnosed with cancer. Not inclined to complain -- and never given much of an opportunity to do so by her family -- she soldiers on.

“Where is my Gretala today?” demands Lotte. “Greta is home puking, Elizabeth wanted to say. She’s getting chemotherapy because she, too, has cancer, but she doesn’t want to worry you because she is generous and brave, Grandma, so get off her back.”

Illness turns out to be the focal point of intimacy among the women of Greta’s family, a phenomenon Schine describes with unflinching candor and a certain bittersweet humor.

When Elizabeth sees the tattoo-like markings on her grandmother’s face -- the aiming points for radiation therapy -- she is moved to crack: “Next we’ll have to get your nipples pierced.” Says Lotte: “Feh!”

Significantly, the men in the lives of these memorable women are either absent, remote or annoying. Lotte’s husband is dead. Greta’s husband is described by the author as both warm and kind, but he also comes across as self-absorbed and self-contained, a man who believes in boundaries “with a capital ‘B.’ ” And Elizabeth cannot seem to make much of a connection with the father of her child, a man who enrolled in one of her classes and ended up in her bed.

“Lotte knew what she knew. You didn’t have to be Dr. Ruth, that little midget, to see it. Anyone with eyes in their head could tell: There was something off about the marriage. They weren’t even married. That was the first clue.”

Then, at the least auspicious of moments in a middle-aged woman’s life, Greta falls in love -- a love, the novel suggests, of the most forbidden kind. As if to signal the crucial plot twist that now comes into play, someone gives her a get-well gift -- a copy of Barbara Pym’s “An Unsuitable Attachment.” “What am I trying to prove?” Greta asks herself. “That I’m alive? Couldn’t I take up oil painting instead?” The object of Greta’s attraction is Daisy, the director attached to Elizabeth’s movie project. “So you’re the hot young director,” says Greta when she first encounters Daisy in a variation of the “cute meet.” “You’re pretty hot yourself,” replies Daisy. For Greta, the prospect of a love affair while struggling with cancer is both scary and exciting: “For surely adultery was doom,” she warns herself. “And adultery with a woman -- that had to be a special, double dose of doom.”

Adultery is the red thread that runs through “She Is Me,” and Greta is hardly the only one at risk. At a pool party, Elizabeth opens her eyes while underwater and spies two of the partygoers secretly touching hands without knowing the identity or even the gender of the two figures: “Like the Sistine Chapel,” she muses. “But who was God and who was Adam down here?”

“She Is Me” is sly, smart and darkly comic. In Elizabeth’s screen version of “Madame Bovary,” the famous adulteress becomes a character named Barbie Bovaine, wife of a surgeon with a Malibu beach house, and the viscount’s ball becomes the bat mitzvah party of a studio mogul’s daughter -- instead of a waltz, they dance the hora. At the same time, the novel is knowing, compassionate, deeply poignant and suffused with a tender and earnest kind of love. In the end, it is a heartbreaking story rather than a scandalous one.

Schine’s ultimate inside joke, however, is that her novel is exactly what Elizabeth’s screenplay is supposed to be: She sets down Madame Bovary in Southern California and brings her fully up to date. “[E]very movie was Madame Bovary,” Elizabeth realizes. “Dodsworth, Niagara, Thelma and Louise were all Madame Bovary.” As Schine allows us to see, so is “She Is Me.”