Sleepwalking

The trouble with this disconcerting first novel is not so much the premise-that a woman in her eighth month of pregnancy is seduced by a man to whom she proves irresistible-but that all the characters are unappealing, and some are downright revolting. The narrator, Susan, is a would-be artist who married her successful management-consultant husband Alastair despite the fact that she did not love him. She elicits little sympathy from the reader, despite the unhappy circumstances of her life, which she recalls in flashback. Her father, Douglas, who has just committed suicide as the novel opens, was viciously mean and sadistically spiteful, the kind of man whose idea of a good time is to take his three young daughters to see the bodies of the rats he has shot. It's no wonder that he turned out so badly, having been brutally mistreated by his mother, the loathsome Queenie, whose hateful conduct is the stuff of melodrama but not of psychologically grounded behavior. Traumatized by both her progenitors, Susan feels she has been sleepwalking through life. Then, when she begins seeing her father's ghost, she realizes that he actually walked in his sleep as a boy. When Lenny, a talented but indigent artist, tells the very pregnant Susan that he adores her, she hopes the affair will bring an end to her ``deep, heart-gripping desolation.'' But the self-pitying tone of this novel, the lack of credible characterization and the assumption that the reader will feel empathy with the suddenly liberated Susan when she decides she must leave her decent, likable husband, make it thoroughly distasteful. Author tour. (Feb.)