Too Hip for Words : There’s No There Here : SIN, <i> By Josephine Hart (Alfred A. Knopf: $20; 176 pp.)</i>

The problem with minimalism is that if you push it too far, you end up with, well, nothing.

Josephine Hart’s second novel, “Sin,” proves just that. A skeletal little outing with big pretensions, this is the story of the mean-spirited relationship between two English cousins. Ruth, our anti-hero, is a self-described “slightly exotic,” “truly beautiful” woman who may well be one of the dullest sinners ever recorded in literature. Nurturing a deep-seated childhood hatred that has transformed her into a “spiritual, malevolent creature,” Ruth secretly desires to take revenge for what she perceives to have been an unfair childhood.

The target of her rather dim-witted obsession is poor, clueless, cousin Elizabeth Ashbridge--the good one--who was raised alongside Ruth at the family estate of Lexington after her own parents were conveniently offed in a car accident. In contrast to Ruth, Elizabeth is a woman of “fastidious cleanliness” and “a high purity.” Unable to come to terms with the fact that Mom and Dad liked Elizabeth best, Ruth bides her time, tiny sentence by tiny sentence, waiting for the perfect opportunity to take her revenge.

There are few things worse than a badly drawn villain, and on that level, at least, Ruth is very bad indeed. In a book about weighty issues such as sin, however, a laughable protagonist really doesn’t get you very far.

Worse still, Ruth narrates! Opening with the sort of obvious, self-conscious prologue that elicits involuntary groans (“Novelists of our own lives, making ourselves up from bits of other people, using the dead and living to tell our tale, we tell tales.”), Ruth’s narrative careens downhill from there until obvious self-consciousness begins to look pretty darn good. For example, here is Ruth’s description of Elizabeth’s first husband:

“He strode across the lawn towards my garden chair, his smiling, courtly face a veritable topography of the balances and planes of light and shade that make a man handsome.”

While this wouldn’t really help a police artist very much, it exhibits an almost laserlike clarity when compared to the manner in which the rest of the cast is drawn. Elizabeth, for example, is off-handedly described as “striking” and “slender,” and that’s about it. Elizabeth’s second husband is passingly compared to a statue and then ignored.

Ruth’s poor husband has to sulk through the entire novel as the sleaziest of blond Americans. And Ruth’s parents, around whom so much revolves, are, literally, never described. In short, when the story desperately requires Hart to describe something well, she cannot. And when, for no apparent reason, she does go off on a descriptive jag , you wish she wouldn’t: “Weekends at Lexington were full of male odours, of an alien pitch of laughter that as a child had thrilled me. Even the colour of Lexington had seemed to change--its red hue seemed daring and triumphant. During its female week it had seemed to me blood red, with black somewhere clotted in its depths.”

This sort of sketchy, slapdash construction permeates every aspect of the book, and it cannot possibly support the rather grand ambitions of the author. Remember, this is ostensibly a deep exploration of, not misdemeanors, but sin, and more specifically the deadly sin of envy. We are supposed to learn something from Ruth’s tempestuous inner struggle with her own depravity.

Unfortunately, Hart illuminates the inner world with about as much grace and subtlety as she does the physical world, so what we end up with is a bunch of one-dimensional characters bumping into each other in the dark. Elizabeth is good. Ruth is bad. Since neither one of them has the self-awareness of a turnip, it’s a little difficult to care about all this. And when Hart does attempt to invest her characters with a little resonance--such as when she attempts to “explain” Ruth’s mean-spirited little soul through bits and pieces of talk-radio psychology--one can only hoot. Ruth’s “inner child” isn’t wounded, she’s merely a tiresome brat.

Not that Hart is afraid to be literary. Foreshadowing with all the subtlety of a drunken cartoonist grasping an 11-foot pencil, Hart will actually commit something like the following to print:

“He had his arm around her waist, and she turned towards him. And gazed at him as if to light his path. Even on a summer day.

“I walked after them. My shadow fell across them. . .”

Ignore. The. Punctuation, if you can. What do you think it means?

And the upshot of all this? Well, amazingly for a book so heavy-handed in setting up the battle between good and evil, the final showdown between Elizabeth and Ruth is a huge anticlimax. Instead of putting up any kind of fight, Elizabeth simply goes off to Scotland. And Ruth? Well, Ruth pirouettes gracelessly in the space of a single paragraph and decides that good really is better than, well, uh, bad. So much for our cautionary moral tale. All of which makes it pretty difficult to figure out just where Hart was going with this ending, although it’s pretty intuitively obvious that she didn’t get anywhere near it.

For all this, because “Sin” arrives a little more than a year after Hart’s huge bestseller, “Damage,” the book undoubtedly will be hugely hyped. You might even hear that it is “haunting and disturbing” (sort of like you might hear about “a very haunting and disturbing Doogie Howser” on TV).

It’s OK to ignore all this. You should not feel guilty about giving this book a wide berth. Heck, you won’t even be missing anything. Face it--if Cain had just taken Abel bowling, we wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time worrying about the tale.