In a stale tale, characters don’t engage, evolve

A middle-aged couple spend a lot of time apart. One fine day, the wife wakes up to realize that -- surprise! -- she and her husband have drifted apart. She wonders if he’s having an affair. (He is.) She then drifts into one of her own with a somewhat younger man with whom she shares more current interests: She illustrates books; he is her editor.

If all this sounds familiar, it is. Thousands of books have mined this store of material. Longtime novelist Anne Bernays is a competent writer who keeps her book moving along at a steady pace: She can toss off the occasional witticism, write the odd line of dialogue that resonates, even produce a sex scene that does not make you cringe. But in her ninth novel, “Trophy House,” Bernays seems unable to summon up any touch of the flair, let alone the imagination and perceptiveness, that might justify rehashing such hackneyed stuff. At no time during my reading of the novel was I even mildly surprised by any development or enlightened by any display of insight or originality.

Part of the trouble lies in the narrator, Dannie Faber, a woman in her 50s who prefers staying in her family’s vacation home on Cape Cod to their main home closer to her husband’s job as an anthropology professor at MIT in Cambridge. Dannie is hard on those around her and pretty much convinced of the eternal validity of everything she believes. Possibly, Bernays has deliberately made her unlikable, but if so, it is insufficiently clear to the reader. The only clue provided seems to be the even more grating tone of her best pal, Raymie, whom Dannie certainly seems to find irritating if irresistible. Is the reader being encouraged to feel about Dannie the same way Dannie feels about Raymie? Or -- more likely -- is Raymie there as a contrast to Dannie? Whatever the case, we are left with a double dose of irritation rather than the preference for the protagonist that Bernays perhaps intended.

But at least Dannie and Raymie, exasperating though they are, express themselves energetically and -- most important -- believably. Few sentences emerging from the mouths of the other characters sound even remotely credible. Worst of all are Dannie’s laconic daughter, Beth, who has fled New York after breaking up with her boyfriend, and her airhead son, Mark, who floats through life: Neither of them is capable of spouting a line that you could remotely accept as real. Not much better are Dannie’s husband, Tom, and her importunate lover, David, who share a decidedly wooden manner of speech.

Cape Cod plays a central role in this novel, and there are musings aplenty about inflated real estate prices, changing times and invasions by types deemed unsuitable by longtime residents. Yet the distinctive atmosphere and qualities of that place are not evoked with particular skill or even enthusiasm.

Everything is self-evidently taken to be what it is: complacency inevitably leading to tautology. Attempts to spice up the narrative with a grisly unsolved murder and an incongruous hate crime fall flatter than flat, as do the now-obligatory references to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the cocktail-party-level chatter about George W. Bush.

Bernays is also capable of getting little things wrong: Dannie eats a salad with six quails in it (who was it intended for? Henry VIII?); she terms a lamb shank part of the animal’s thigh: as incorrect anatomically as it is clumsy culinarily.

The novel’s title refers directly to the ostentatious abode that initially outrages Dannie and Raymie but with which they become incongruously involved. It is a mystery why Bernays chose a title pertaining to what is certainly a considerable but nonetheless finally ancillary subplot.

Most of the novel centers on Dannie, her marriage, her affair and her other relationships. The house and its owner -- and their evolution from the monstrous into the faintly ridiculous -- are among the more tedious and creaky aspects of this narrative. Whenever they appear on the scene, it seems an intrusion into the real meat, such as it is, of the story.

By the time “Trophy House” arrives at its tiresomely open-ended conclusion, the narrator’s self-satisfaction knows no bounds, and it is clear that this is a protagonist who has not managed to grow one inch during the course of the novel. Bernays’ inability to show any psychological acuity or to get under the skin of her characters makes one ponder the utility of an enterprise so dry of inspiration. If only there were the merest hint of real insight or even a breath of fresh air, there might be some reason to read this book.

Merle Rubin is a contributing writer to Book Review.