Careening down a witty, neurotic road to nowhere

SOME protagonists suck us in with their personality flaws, becoming anti-heroes whose car wrecks of lives invite rubbernecking. Emily Rhode is more like the driver who cuts into your lane while preoccupied as she talks on a cellphone. Any cursory feeling we can muster can be summed up in a one-fingered wave.

Which is a pity, because novelist Jill A. Davis puts some fine decorative flourishes into the unlikable Emily, but it’s not enough to salvage “Ask Again Later,” a snarky story about a neurotic, romantically challenged New Yorker in search of a cure for her self-absorption.

Emily’s father left when she was 5, forever ruining Christmas, wouldn’t you know it. Now 30, she’s forced to confront those nasty feelings of abandonment when her world-class drama queen mother announces that she has breast cancer and insists she’s fated to a prolonged and dolorous demise. And up pops long-lost Dad.

The novel opens with Emily answering phones in her father’s law office, having used Mom’s illness as an excuse to walk out on her promising law career as well as her quirky, if somewhat stiff, boyfriend Sam. She narrates the dissolutions in flashback and with enough honesty to admit she’s placing blame for her dysfunction in all the wrong places.

We watch Emily hit bottom, mine her failures for laughs and lurch toward the brass ring that is happily ever after, which is all that keeps the plot from bogging down in self-pity: “I may be the only professional in history to ever take several giant steps backward by cashing in on my ‘connections.’ ”

If Davis had resisted the urge to trot out the standard chick-lit tropes of the gay best friend and flaky therapist, she might’ve been forced to find a way to say something new about how a damaged young woman can learn empathy and make lasting emotional connections.

At least Davis, the author of “Girls’ Poker Night” and a former writer for David Letterman’s show, can work magic with dialogue that crackles with electricity between highly charged characters and is often as funny for what’s left unsaid. Consider this exchange, ostensibly about orange juice:

“ ‘I’m going to make a smoothie,’ Mom says.

“ ‘I like pulp, by the way,’ I say.

“ ‘No, you don’t, and you never have,’ Mom says. ‘So if you like it now, you’re just being disagreeable.’

“She’s good! For a split second there, I thought maybe I didn’t like pulp.”

But most of Davis’ descriptions dance around particulars. Surely someone who has the prowess to describe Emily’s mother as looking “like a woman who’s had her share of well-researched, age-minimizing treatments” can find a clever way to tell us what color her hair and eyes are.

Davis does riff artfully about Emily’s obsessions, particularly an espresso machine that fills in for human relationships and the bulletproof plexiglass that shields her reception desk -- an obvious metaphor for the emotional walls she has erected. In fact, nearly every description does double duty thematically, as in this musing at the directions her car’s onboard computer gives aloud: “If possible, take the next left. If possible? Where was this voice when I needed it? Where was this voice when I was making all those wrong turns in my twenties?”

Davis maps an emotional terrain, following the harrowing contours and treacherous twists of the psyche, rather than a physical reality. That makes a visceral reaction more difficult. It may be that Davis has made the mistake of trying to cast Emily’s minutely specific problem as universal and not rooted in any particular place and time. If so, she has overestimated Emily’s appeal beyond her thirtysomething demographic and her East Coast urban niche.

Anne Boles Levy reviews children’s books at www.bookbuds.net. She also is co-founder of the Cybils awards for bloggers on children’s and young adult literature.