Sister act

REASONS to read a novel: To relax. To learn something. To read good writing. To discuss the novel with friends. To be entertained. To see the world through the lens of literature. To avoid the demands of the quotidian. To experience a way of living or a part of the world you otherwise might not. If a novel is written as entertainment, is it fair to hold its characters and plot to standards you apply to literature with a longer shelf life?

Anna Quindlen’s “Rise and Shine” is a novel you read to be entertained -- although, unlike others meant as entertainment, it relies more on character than plot. You may recognize problems pertaining to your own life. Seeing them play out with Quindlen’s considerable gifts as a writer may help you solve them. What keeps us reading, given the blinking screens that surround us and promise greater excitement? Raw talent, sure -- but also the hope of recognition. That’s the hook at a novel’s heart: If I behave like Meghan Fitzmaurice (“Rise and Shine’s” protagonist), or Bridget, her younger sister, will I feel happy and whole?

Meghan is the host of everyone’s favorite morning TV show, “Rise and Shine.” She’s a no-nonsense reporter and the hottest property on network television. She swims miles each day at lunch, attends the requisite fundraisers and travels the world in style, meeting popes and presidents, interviewing everyone who’s anyone. She’s worth tens of millions of dollars. But her son has been raised by nannies and his Aunt Bridget. Meghan’s marriage is just an arrangement. Bridget is the one who holds the family together, meets people at the airport, goes to school functions. She’s a social worker and runs a small nonprofit in the Bronx called Women on Women. Her career path has been funkier than Meghan’s, including a period of watching soap operas in a housedress. Soon after the novel opens, Meghan makes a serious mistake on the air. Believing that the cameras are off, she calls her celebrity guest an unprintable expletive. Her career destroyed, Meghan goes into hiding and Bridget is left holding the bag.

Quindlen has been writing columns for several decades. After four bestselling novels, a Pulitzer and several books on life and living, she has a lot of confidence in herself, her writing and the relevance of her observations. She writes with authority, whether she’s describing New York as “the center of the universe” or holding forth on the supposed intuition of black women. “We know things,” says Tequila, a powerful, funny figure in the novel. “We who?” asks Bridget. “Black women, that’s we who,” says Tequila. “Wait,” says Bridget, “we’re supposed to pretend we’re all the same, but it turns out you all got the intuition?”

Quindlen knows such sentiments will offend some readers, but with her finger on America’s pulse, she also knows just how hard she can push. Often, though, you get the sense that all these characters are Quindlen. This is true of any writer, but more so of a columnist who has trusted her own voice and judgment for so long and to such acclaim. She seems to suggest here that we’re all alike deep down, no matter how much money we have or where we come from. You either believe this line of thought or you don’t. This reader doesn’t. People who have to scrape together the rent money and are exhausted by public transportation and poor nutrition have different daily concerns. They may face the same traumas -- infidelity, disease, abuse, family discord -- but they bring vastly different levels of weariness to the table. Quindlen has made Tequila, who lives in the projects and works for Bridget’s nonprofit, too much like Meghan and Bridget, as though they were all sitting together on the great equalizing stage of Oprah or Dr. Phil.

Many New Yorkers write about the city as if it were such a stage. But in a time of wide income disparities, the idea that we all, rich and poor, face the same dilemmas lacks a certain grace, if not honesty. Meghan’s milieu is only slightly different from her sister’s. They both eat at the River Cafe and Le Bernardin and other tony restaurants Tequila has never been to. Bridget’s nonprofit world intersects with her sister’s monied world at benefits and in the New York Times. “The most common misconception about New York City,” writes Quindlen, evincing the small-town bent of well-off New Yorkers who frequently encounter one another in all the same places, “is that you can lose yourself there. You can understand why people from Ames, Iowa, or Eugene, Oregon, might think this.”

Quindlen is well versed in the levels of success marked in New York by things like kitchen windows: “For some of us the kitchen with the window means we have finally arrived at some precarious level of prosperity. For others it was ... a way station between the first book proposal and the third bestseller, the summer associate’s job and the partnership, the husband who teaches comparative lit at Columbia and the one who runs the big brokerage house.” This paragraph is chock full of assumptions, the most glaring of which is that we are all educated and sophisticated enough even to get our foot in the door, let alone pull together the down payment or the first month’s rent. The trickle only trickles down so far.

But the biggest problem with this novel -- which is very entertaining, more so if you recognize all the stages of success (the terra cotta tiles, the paillettes on an evening dress) than if you don’t -- is that it takes on the shape of a doughnut, built around a character, Meghan, who isn’t worth the attention. She’s not deep or fascinating enough to merit her sister’s fawning concern, much less ours. She’s just a celebrity who makes a mistake on the air and then disappears. She’s not a particularly good mother or reporter or even a good sister. She’s self-centered, ambitious and not much more. We resist the conclusion Quindlen leads us to -- that Meghan, a working woman, has sacrificed too much for her job. Luckily, she has enough money to make everything all right in the end. Even fairy tales used to have more depth than that.