The Misery Artist

By John Skow

TITLE: FOR LOVE

AUTHOR: SUE MILLER

PUBLISHER: HARPERCOLLINS; 301 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: A dolorous bedroom farce that could be titled Whimpers of a Summer Night.

Pick a page, any page. Here's 283: "She is tired, she is in pain. There is just a jumble, finally. The sense of false understanding, of confusion and vulnerability at the core; all of it driven by the steady and growing pain from her tooth." Or page 89: "She remembered those two months . . . as being among the most miserable of her life." Or page 31: ". . . she feels a tug of revulsion at herself . . . for moving cowlike, thickly . . ." Lottie Gardner does, in fact, have serious dental problems throughout this irritating novel. But the ruling fact of her life is not that she has a toothache, but that she is one.

She is a misery artist, the kind of old friend you make excuses not to have lunch with. She is healthy, toothache aside, reasonably attractive and not clinically depressed, but she defines her life entirely by her relationships with other people, and these always fall short of felicity.

Lottie's neurotic elder brother resumes an obsessive affair with Elizabeth, a shallow beauty Lottie continues to resent because of snubs in their high school years. Her 21-year-old son sleeps with Elizabeth's baby-sitter, then ignores her, and when she dies in an auto accident decreed by the author to get everyone's moping started, wonders fretfully whether he is obliged to attend her funeral. Other people behave shabbily, all of them, like Lottie, largely humorless and utterly self-absorbed. An occasional good line briefly clears the prevailing swamp gas, as when Lottie sums things up for her brother's lover's complaining husband: "She left you. You chased her. On the , great seesaw of love, she's up and you're down."

What is welcome about this deft writing-off of a twerp is that the voice is not Lottie's. It is the author's, and the effect is to give the reader distance from characters who, though they don't realize this, are acting out a comedy. But novelist Miller, instead of describing the mawkishness, chose to take trifling people seriously. The result is that although the author's previous novel Family Pictures became a prime-time TV mini-series, For Love is daytime soap opera.