"Pitch Dark" has its clever moments and, in its central section, something that resembles a story, but it's not the witty virtuoso performance that "Speedboat" was. The earlier book was put together like a collage of file cards on which Adler had scribbled whatever jokes, anecdotes and scraps of conversation she could use to define a contemporary sensibility. The architecture of this one is visibly more ambitious, more ambiguous. It is, I think, an anorectic novel: its class, its intelligence and the high seriousness of its intentions don't quite justify its lack of flesh.

Plot and character are for other people's novels; "Pitch Dark" presents a situation that Adler develops by theme and variations. The narrator, Kate Ennis, may be a newspaperwoman in her 40s, but the important thing about her is her tone of voice, her diffidence about telling her story ("I don't know where it begins...