When We Get Home

This debut novel about a young woman whose much-divorced parents have left her with no talent for commitment (but with a wistful desire for it, nonetheless) is written in such a fashionably passionless style that it's often hard to care what comes next. Annie drifts first into marriage and then into a series of affairs; her husband has a nervous breakdown and her brother sleeps with their father's beautiful young wife. Meanwhile, the reader wonders why any of this had to happen--or had to be presented so dispiritedly. By the end, Annie has learned a few old-fashioned lessons about the endurance of love and the need to connect, but even this development seems fairly arbitrary here--the very act of determining what matters doesn't seem to matter much, given Markson's tepid prose and her refusal to utilize a genuine gift for humor to animate and enrich these characters. As it is, their deliberate quirkiness doesn't compensate for their lack of depth; the elliptical, hip exchanges between them, apparently meant to suggest intimacy, are a poor substitute. (June)