Getting Used to Not Being Remarkable

If Stephen Daedalus shelved his defiance, married and continued teaching, he would probably be in a similar position to Foley's protagonist, Martin Ward, an Irish-expat math instructor employed--to his dismay--at a convent school in London. In his third novel, Foley (The Road to Notown) shuttles between Martin's current problems--professional, marital and spiritual--and his youthful promise, growing up rebelliously in a bourgeois Ulster family. Just as the young Martin separated himself from his parochial background through his passions for pure mathematics and 19th-century French po tes maudits, the older, tamer Martin now discovers his wife, Clare, rebelliously exploring the '70s New Wave pop scene and embarking on a frank extramarital affair. Grumpily, Martin finds himself minding the two young children and trying not to plunge into jealous rages when Clare adopts a whole new life of adventure. Foley's wry, piquant story skillfully balances these alternating points of view, keeping a keen eye on the dynamics of faculty politics, extended families, and love's metamorphoses during a marriage. Foley deftly punctuates these events with quotes from Flaubert, Rimbaud, de Lautr amont and assorted French decadents arrayed as wittily as pop songs in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity. Early on, Martin's exasperatingly positive friend Bernard nails Martin's adult dilemma: ""Perhaps the sensation of being intrinsically wonderful is as crippling as the sensation of being intrinsically worthless."" Bound to be compared to the works of Patrick McCabe and Roddy Doyle, Foley's novel is stingingly funny, ruefully perceptive and anything but unremarkable. (Apr.)