Splinters

Poor Stevie, the female narrator around whom this pretentious and self-indulgent first novel revolves: Early on she informs the reader of her great looks, wit and brains (``My IQ was at least 18 times my shoe size and I was certainly 90% more intelligent than 90% of the people I knew''), and what a great big success she has become in the advertising business in New York City. She then proceeds to tell us, by way of endless metaphors and similes, the oh-so-personally-tragic story of the time her famously handsome and flirtatious ex-husband (a Nobel Prize-bound playwright, no less), decided that he just couldn't live without her any longer and spent a few months trying his best to woo her back. Although the author, a former advertising copywriter, has Stevie proclaim, ``Woody Allen might make a film that had characters like us,'' the assertion is wishful thinking. Cliche-ridden (``it hit me, like a ton of bricks'') and contrived, this book is filled with a shallow and superficial cast of upscale 40-something characters who take themselves far too seriously. (Oct.)