Although they have talked on the phone almost daily for twenty years and are both artists, Clea, the central character, and her friend Elke, have very different personalities. Clea, a successful photographer with a picture-perfect family and an exciting extramarital life, is a sorority girl gone wild — good looks, good clothes, and good luck, and amazingly enough, a good marriage to Turner, an overgrown frat boy become international businessman. Elke, a shy, serious, haunted sculptor, is married to Terence, a protective but possessive intellectual whose antisocial tendencies are as pronounced as are Turner's social ones. The characters and couples are mirror images — Clea and Turner are superficial, ironized, glitzy, yuppies, the comic pair, and Elke and Terence the serious, self-absorbed, nihilistic intellectuals.

The novel turns around the relationship between Clea and Elke, two characters so different one sometimes wonders what they see in each other. Clea's...