Holding Out

Former financial analyst Faulk makes her debut with a sprawling, relentlessly upbeat variation on Aristophanes' Lysistrata. When Congress votes not to impeach the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, whose abuse of his wife led to her suicide, the nation's enraged women threaten mayhem. Smart, beautiful and nobody's fool, a successful single mother and managing partner of the Atlanta office of a prominent investment firm, Lauren Fontaine joins the march on Washington. On the way, she meets hunky Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jake Ward and hears for the first time (improbably for a supposedly well-educated woman) the legend of Lysistrata, who convinced the women of Athens and Sparta to withhold sex from their husbands until they halted the Peloponnesian War. So, although she's dying to jump into bed with Jake, Lauren makes a speech calling for American women to refuse sex until the Chief Justice is removed from office and sentenced. The strike takes hold, but Lauren loses her job, sees her character trashed on TV and in magazines and receives death threats. Faulk spices things up with Lauren's clever scheme to get back her stock holdings and severance pay, which the old boys at her firm are refusing to part with. Equal parts political call-to-arms, financial thriller, romance and sassy Southern women's novel, the book suffers from the contrived dialogue that plagues most of the love scenes and the sisterhood confabs. But it is redeemed by Faulk's lively portrayal of the media and the financial world. (A trading floor is ""what mission control would look like if NASA were taken over by overgrown fraternity boys with eating disorders""). Film rights to HBO. (Mar.)