No one can accuse Marilyn French of having more than one string to her bow. If her first novel, "The Women's Room," was a didactic demonstration of why marriage won't work until the foundations of industrial society are altered, then her new book, "The Bleeding Heart," is exactly the same thing…. The trouble … is that her first novel succeeded despite its grave artistic shortcomings. Indeed, she managed to turn those shortcomings to her advantage, by saying, in so many words, that if the men in her story were stick figures, it was because men in reality are stick figures; if the story she was telling was dreary, it was because the reality of marriage was dreary; and if her narrator's voice was monomaniacal, it was because she had been driven nearly mad by the truth. All of which lent "The Women's Room" considerable documentary power, and, by a...