Altar Ego

From the iconoclastic Lette, here's another ""single girl"" book to join the current trend, a self-consciously sassy English novel about a 32-year-old woman torn between boring Mr. Right and the absolute freedom of shagging anyone she wants. In her fifth novel (after Mad Cows and Foetal Attraction), Lette's heroine Becky Steele makes the protagonists of Laura Zigman, Helen Fielding and Suzanne Finnamore look like veritable prudes, as she blazes new trails in satisfying her desires. Assisted (and thwarted) by two superficial and bitchy girlfriends, Becky tries to stanch her fear of marrying perfect, prosaic lawyer Julian, by falling for Zachary Phoenix Burne, a ""black boy-toy with the gi-normous cream stick."" Rock star Zack is an unconvincing character, blatantly stupid as he utters lines like: ""See, that's one of the reasons I like yer, 'Cause you know all them big words."" Conversely, Becky and her wise-cracking, man-hating ""feminist"" girlfriend Kate (who, of course, eventually turns into a hubby-stealing vamp) get all the hackneyed one-liners: ""The medical term for a woman paralyzed from the waist down and the neck up is `marriage'""; ""If marriage was a horse, no self-respecting gambler would take a punt on it."" The book blithely careens from male-strip club to beauty spa, from bedroom to divorce court, with friends, sisters, boyfriends and husbands comically, if absurdly, loving, leaving and betraying each other, compulsively churning out biting jokes and raunchiness passing for candor. Readers may feel ambivalent about Becky and her circle of chameleon friends turning their wedding rings into circus rings--the comedy is less a lusty, irreverent romp than a collection of one-note jokes encapsulated perfectly by such tepid chapter titles as ""Cross My Legs and Hope to Die,"" ""Till Divorce Us Do Part"" and ""I Waxed My Bikini Line for This?"" (Sept.)