Out Of Her League

By Barbara Rudolph

TO DIE FOR by Joyce Maynard

Dutton; 241 pages; $20

In 1972 Joyce Maynard burst onto the literary scene, writing an autobiographical cover story for the New York Times Magazine titled "An 18- Year-Old Looks Back on Life." She parlayed her reputation as the most famous teenager on the Eastern Seaboard into a grownup career as a writer, producing capable and occasionally compelling chronicles of all things domestic. She has produced one novel and countless articles, and has been labeled -- not unfairly -- a women's writer. Now she has attempted a crime novel loosely based on a tabloid murder. The result is a whydunit.

To Die For follows the well-covered case of New Hampshire high school instructor Pamela Smart, convicted in 1991 of persuading her teenage lover to kill her husband. In Maynard's novel the cold-blooded, career-obsessed killer is Suzanne Maretto, who hungers to become the next Barbara Walters. Her husband is a sweet-tempered restaurant manager, and her lover is an emotionally fragile teenage boy.

Maynard's chosen genre is not an easy one, and she makes her task more difficult by telling her story in 25 different voices, with each short chapter written in the first person. The author's attempt at so many voices when she is not sure of even one seems utter folly. While they are meant to sound distinct, the characters sound curiously similar. Despite their blue-collar vernacular, each remains somehow knowing and clever.

Strewn throughout this story are seemingly gratuitous nods to bits and pieces of popular culture: show-biz celebrities, movies, rock groups. Maynard suggests that her alienated characters suffer the modern ailment of media overload. Toward the end of the novel, the mother of the hired teenage killer speaks: "One minute you're sitting there, reading some article in a magazine all about Tom Selleck or someone, the next thing you know they're putting handcuffs on your son. . .It doesn't feel like your real life, you know? It feels like you're on a show too. Only there's no commercials. And it doesn't end."

To Die For develops a narrative momentum, but in the end the plot seems preordained and the characters never remotely credible. Maynard's subject is off her beaten track. Next time she might opt to stick closer to home.