All the wrong moves

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING’S irritating but compelling novel “As If Love Were Enough” features a maddening, very believable protagonist whose neuroses readers will yearn to unravel. Narrator Clare Layton is the kind of character you want to grab by the shoulders and shake. She’s had a six-year affair with a married man, she tells us: “I am forty-one.... I have been a mistress right through the waning of my fertility.” This self-pitying tone is immediately off-putting. What woman today describes herself as “a mistress”? And why has Clare used this clandestine romance as an excuse to cut herself off from the rest of the world? We learn that she’s a transplant from Southern California who hasn’t spoken to her older sister, Louise, in 27 years, but what exactly is she so angry about?

It seems we’ll soon find out when Louise turns up in New York claiming to be fleeing an abusive husband in Florida. Though we can see that Clare desperately wants to reestablish a relationship with her estranged sister, she is wary and nasty. She mocks Louise’s matronly appearance, even her hearty appetite. Whenever Michael, her married lover, calls, Clare jumps into some “girl-flirty” clothes and goes off to regale him with funny stories about Louise. “I have turned my sister into a heartland, baco bit-eating anecdote,” she admits.

So we don’t feel too badly for Clare when Louise reveals that she has an ulterior motive for making up: Her 17-year-old son, Luke, needs a new liver, Louise explains, and she wants Clare to write something about him, in hopes that the publicity will get him to the top of the transplant list. Enraged by the deception, Clare provokes Louise with oblique, taunting references to their shared past. “I see you’ve done your homework ... that was never your strong suit,” she sneers. The scene ends in shrieks and tears, with Louise heading home and Clare continuing to nurse a mysterious grudge.

At this point, we still have little idea why Clare is so upset and what she intends to do about it. Nor do we understand why she abruptly heads to Orlando to meet Luke. She finds her nephew preaching at an evangelical convention and is unnerved by his faith, but he looks just like her beloved father, and their conversation hints that Clare’s “redemption” is coming via her nephew.

Alas, saintliness is a heavy burden for any character to bear, and Fleming fails to make Luke charismatic enough to justify Clare’s rapturous response to him. Luke then drops out of sight for 150 pages as the narrative flashes back more than 30 years to the trauma that led to his mother and aunt’s bitter estrangement.

Two weeks after their 1966 Christmas party, the sisters’ mother, beautiful TV actress Patricia Layton, leaves screenwriter Phil Layton to move in with Joe, a co-star she’s been sleeping with. Clare, loyal to Daddy, is cool to the new couple. Louise likes having glamorous weekends with them at the Beverly Hills Hotel, until Joe leaves and Patricia has a mysterious breakdown and disappears altogether for several years.

Louise, beautiful and restless like her mother, flits in and out of the house where the girls live with their father; reliable Clare tries to woo her sister to stay, all the while resenting that Louise doesn’t appreciate her commitment to their father. Fleming acutely sketches the tensions of a failed marriage, the divided loyalties and painful mixed emotions prompted by parents who can’t quite let go of each other. The seeds of Clare’s hard, disapproving adult self are discernible, but she’s less disagreeable as a frightened kid, and we better understand her anger at Louise, who’s a shallow and feckless teen. Patricia Layton remains a cipher, but Phil is a wonderful character: loving, weak and agonizingly vulnerable.

Louise leaves home at age 16, more or less -- the author’s inability to synchronize dates and ages is a minor annoyance throughout -- because her father faults her for a drug-induced brawl that leaves her boyfriend blind in one eye. Nearly 20 years then pass in barely 20 pages that founder on flagrant omissions of crucial information. When a protagonist’s personality is founded on the central fact that she feels abandoned by her mother and sister, it’s authorial cheating to let both of them sneak back into her father’s life, but not hers, without a word of explanation.

These glaring lacunas, which make Clare seem more vengeful than injured, mean that the author has a lot of heavy lifting to do when the narrative returns to the present and asks us to believe that her encounter with Luke has put her on the path to self-knowledge. We’ve certainly seen how bitter Clare is, but nothing Fleming has shown us about her suggests that she really wants to change. So when she breaks up with her lover, makes a predictable sacrifice for Luke and even comes to terms with Mother, it’s schematic and not very convincing. This writer does rage and self-pity better than forgiveness and reconciliation.

However -- and this is a big caveat -- there’s a good deal of pleasure to be had from Fleming’s sharp eye for less-than-admirable sentiments, her brisk and intelligent prose, her unfailing ability to lob plot twists at us. Even if she doesn’t always satisfyingly answer the questions she raises, she knows how to keep us turning the pages. *