Coming-of-age story leaves some 'Dreams' unfulfilled

The Man of My Dreams
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House, 272 pp., $22.95

A friend whose first novel was a phenomenal bestseller talked about his second book as if it were a trip to the dentist. I'm just going to get it over with, he said, and then turn to my third. Spectacular success promotes such doubts.

Curtis Sittenfeld, whose sparkling debut , ``Prep ," moved the earth for multitudes, has this time produced a vin ordinaire. Can we blame a publisher so anxious to ride the coattails of a success that it rushed its talented writer to deliver this effort? Or perhaps an earlier abandoned attempt was resurrected to please marketing.

Granted Sittenfeld can ace the coming-of-age novel. She writes with humor, intelligence, insight , and heart. She's also as good at sharp social satire as she is at tender mercies. Still, it's hard not to compare. Take the titles -- the crisp ``Prep" vs. the flabby ``The Man of My Dreams." Take the protagonists: the marvelously flawed, not always endearing, yet original Lee Fiora vs. the wimpy , accommodating Hannah Gavener. We like her, but we've seen her before.

The novel charts 14 years of Hannah's rocky path to true love. In the first section, Hannah is 14, an angst-ridden Julia Roberts fan, a dysfunctional family casualty who has been sent to live with an aunt. Her bully of a father has exiled her, her headband-wearing mother, and her sister Allison. ``He's the weather system they live with, and all of their behavior . . . hinges on his mood."

Whether all happy families are alike or not hardly matters to Hannah, who has never known one; that is, until she discovers this ideal in her aunt's household of nurse, truck driver, and Down's syndrome son. ``Do people really live so peacefully and treat each other so kindly?" she says. On the defensive, she rationalizes that an unstable family ``makes you understand that the world doesn't exist to accommodate you ."

When the novel moves to Hannah's freshman year at Tufts, she doesn't crave excitement but simply a normal college life. She worries about making friends. Her fellow students seem to be having sex as casually as they order pizza. Hannah has not had sex ; she's never even kissed anybody. She starts seeing a psychiatrist, whose sessions she pays for by a job shelving books.

Hannah's opposite is her gorgeous, promiscuous cousin Fig. Driving to Cape Cod with Fig's ex-boyfriend Henry to rescue Fig from yet another dangerous liaison, Hannah complains, ``It's still unfair that only some girls grow up to get boys like this." Unlike Fig, Hannah knows that nobody else is going to rescue her, that she will have to do it herself.

At 21, she has to do everything by herself. A disastrous lunch with her father ends in his refusing to pay her senior-year tuition and in her decision to cut off all communication with him. Furthermore, she still hasn't been kissed. When at last this lack is filled by an assistant account executive with a hearing aid, ``she never imagined that her first kiss would take place . . . with a guy who's almost thirty , while she's wearing glasses." The minute she admits she's a virgin, the kisser says , ``I think you should do this with someone you love."

She tries to find someone to love. On a trip to Alaska with her sister, her sister's fiancé , and his brother, she struggles to parse her sister's romance: `` They make thoughtful dinners that involve cilantro, they do the Times crossword puzzle together [and] they favor hats and mittens knit by Paraguayan peasants." These Alaskan scenes provide a countercultural interlude for Sittenfeld to explore the sexual tension between Hannah and Sam's brother Elliot. Tension between the sisters surfaces, too. Allison's worst insult is ``You remind me of Dad." Picky like her father, Hannah meets a nice suitor who nevertheless `` unironically pronounce[s] the word genuine gen-u-wine." Predictably, she loses her virginity. Love, however, remains elusive.

Five years later, her mother remarries, she meets with her father, she acquires a handsome skirt-chasing boyfriend, and she's beginning to recognize hard truths. Perhaps what she really wants is ``a man who will deny her. . . . She'd been raised, after all, not to be accommodated but to accommodate." When accommodation fails, she exchanges adolescent panic for mid- 20s wisdom: ``A lot of life is distasteful and embarrassing . And you just push through it. Isn't that the big lesson we learned from living with Dad?"

The final chapter, a letter to her psychiatrist, sums up such lessons as she dissects her life in bellybutton-watching detail. Though she hasn't found the man of her dreams, she's found the job of her dreams, work that is an ironic reflection of her own problems. ``Dr. Lewin, I am telling you all of this so you'll know I moved on; I progressed," Hannah writes.

The author, too, will move on. While there are far too many `` so what?" moments in this sophomore effort, the novel still offers pleasures, especially the portrait of Hannah's father and her touching torment of self-discovery. Sittenfeld's wry viewpoint makes us stick with her story. When Hannah, envisioning her future, says, ``Bad or painful things will occur for her, surely, but she will bounce back from them," we agree. This terrific author will bounce back with a vengeance. And we'll be waiting.

Mameve Medwed's latest novel is ``How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life." She can be reached through her website at www.mamevemedwed.com.