GROWING PAIN

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

At the end of Sigrid Nunez's much praised first novel, A Feather on the Breath of God, the protagonist, a daughter of joyless immigrant parents, leaves her pained life in New York City to teach English in China. Never having experienced a sense of emotional belonging, she now chooses a life that will make her perpetual sense of alienation all the more urgent.

It is fitting that the heroine of the author's fine, quietly melancholy second book, Naked Sleeper (HarperCollins; 235 pages; $23), should share her predecessor's vocation, for she too seems compelled to intensify her sense of disconnect. Though Nona never leaves her native Manhattan, she teaches English to lonely foreigners who, just like her, are lost souls in a land of plenty. Abandoned as a child by her father, Nona at middle age finds herself in what is for her an uncomfortable place: a safe, happy marriage to a man who probably won't leave. Like a girl in a beautiful dress that fits just too snugly, she must find a way out. The humiliation she suffers when she does so (in wrenching, honest scenes) ultimately transforms her from a narcissist into, finally, at 40, a grownup.

Save for occasional tedious digressions--four whole paragraphs on Nona's yoga breathing--Nunez limns Nona's search for self with some impressively elegant writing, which gives this book its true appeal. Of the love letters Nona receives, Nunez writes, "They were carried away not by love but by the vocabulary of love, the adjectives and verbs of love, one smooth golden word following another, like honey dripping from a spoon." For the most part, Nunez's prose flows just as fluidly.

--By Ginia Bellafante