Two's a crowd

Something Blue
By Emily Giffin
St. Martin's, 338 pp., $22.95

The Starter Wife
By Gigi Levangie Grazer
Simon & Schuster, 359 pp., $24

Nine Wives
By Dan Elish
St. Martin's, 276 pp., paperback, $12.95

When it comes to marriage, the wannabes and used-to-bes have a perverse advantage over the happily coupled. Their stories are compelling from the get-go. As Bridget Jones established, self-satisfied marrieds are mere foils for the misadventures of a singleton: hot pursuit, whether desperate or passive-aggressive, is more riveting than conjugal smugness.

Emily Giffin's second novel, ''Something Blue," is a juicy follow-up to her provocatively titled debut, ''Something Borrowed." Darcy Rhone's maid of honor -- a bosom buddy since elementary school -- has walked off with Darcy's fiance, a handsome Goldman Sachs banker. Rachel, a studious lawyer with ungroomed eyebrows and unremarkable features, has ''always played second fiddle" to Darcy. ''Born beautiful," with ''bow-shaped lips," ''distinctive eyebrows," and ''an exceptional hairline," Darcy was destined to become a high school cheerleader.

Having lost her male trophy to a mousy sidekick, Darcy is ''turning into one of those girls who . . . feels wistful" about high school, when her position in the romantic food chain was both obvious and secure. The reader who doesn't identify with Darcy's nostalgia might take sadistic pleasure in her comeuppance: The wedding is called off; her fiance uses their honeymoon tickets to take Rachel to Hawaii; and Darcy is pregnant after an extended fling with one of the intended groomsmen. Darcy was academically lazy but romantically precocious, and now it's catching up with her. Tricks that worked with high school boys don't give a woman staying power in her 30s.

''Something Borrowed," the precursor to ''Something Blue," was chick lit's homage to ''The Tortoise and the Hare" -- narrated by an ambivalent tortoise (Rachel), inching her way toward romantic victory and getting out from under Darcy's thumb. ''Something Blue" is narrated by Darcy -- the enraged hare trying to make sense of the outcome. Darcy, who was unfaithful to her fiance, is nonetheless devastated by Rachel's betrayal. Is cheating on your best friend more treacherous than lying to your future spouse?

This flawed, bitchy narrator can be highly entertaining. (''The museums and cathedrals weren't going anywhere, whereas fashion was changing by the second" is how Darcy justifies her shopping addiction when she finds herself in London.) Her first visit to a good-looking female obstetrician is a minefield of prefeminist anxieties: Threatened by Dr. Stein's impressive jewelry, full breasts, and other attributes, Darcy catches the father of her unborn child staring at her new doctor's ''toned left thigh" and wonders if ''ugly girls had more time to study in medical school."

As Darcy becomes a better person, she brings to mind a tyrant in an Enlightenment drama whose moral transformation saves the day. (Some readers will miss the domineering shopaholic bluntly sizing up her competition whenever she meets another woman.) Despite a happy ending, Giffin raises thorny questions. A long friendship can (like marriage) turn claustrophobic or abusive. Is infidelity the solution? And why are pretty girls so easily taken in by scheming plain Janes?

Gigi Levangie Grazer's ''The Starter Wife" is a savvy beach read for grown-ups who cut their teeth on Jackie Collins: In this irreverent tale of a Hollywood power couple's divorce, Grazer doesn't mince words. Like her previous Los Angeles novel, ''Maneater," ''The Starter Wife" begins as a bawdy comedy of manners.

When Gracie Pollock finds her husband's hair clogging the shower drain, she is two weeks away from being divorced. Too late, she realizes that Kenny Pollock, a self-centered movie producer who ''isn't even gay," would shave his body hair only if he were cheating.

A pop star more famous for exposing her thong than for her singing turns out to be Kenny's home-wrecking catalyst: He has always wanted to be on the cover of Us magazine and she just might get him there. After a weekend with Kenny's girlfriend, Gracie's 3-year-old daughter, Jaden, reappears in lip gloss, perfume, and ''a tight pink T-shirt with the words PORN STAR on it."

Meanwhile, Gracie -- evicted from the McMansion and forced to live in Malibu -- has become a social outcast. No longer a ''wife of," she is convinced that being 40 in L.A. ''is like fifty anywhere else," but ''The Starter Wife" is ultimately as good-natured as it is cynical: a funny, enjoyable diversion.

Switch coasts and meet Henry Mann, another outsider to matrimony with his nose pressed against the glass. The daydreaming hero of Dan Elish's astute, funny ''Nine Wives" is a New York archetype, right down to his love of musical theater, happily divorced parents, and fifth-floor Greenwich Village walk-up. Every literate woman who has been single in Manhattan has encountered a bachelor like Henry: a well-read, emotionally available, multifaceted slacker with a day job unrelated to his career dreams. (Henry's a part-time proofreader at a corporate law firm, while his work-in-progress is a Broadway musical based on ''The Great Gatsby.")

Even Henry's nightmares are dominated by marriage. One afternoon, he envisions a safari honeymoon with an ill-tempered lawyer, Patricia, known as ''the barking hyena." After witnessing the brutal skinning of a gazelle, he attends his own funeral and recoils. Henry doesn't see himself as a house husband after all.

In lieu of a fairy-tale ending, Elish reverses the order. ''Nine Wives" is a witty tasting menu, each chapter named after a fantasy wife. When the final appetizer arrives, you'll know why dessert was served first, along with those after-dinner drinks.

Tracy Quan's second novel, ''Diary of a Married Call Girl," will be published in September.