Marjorie Morningstar is about a curious and good-looking woman whose destiny is entirely wrapped up in the men she chooses. First she picks a flashily sexy but soft-at-the-core lover. But eventually the light dawns, and she sees that the gawk who loved her all along is the real man….

In her fifth novel, The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard retells the Marjorie Morningstar story, only this time the action takes place in England, the ingenue is called Caro Bell, and Mr. Dazzle and Mr. Rightstuff are, respectively, Paul Ivory, a successful playwright, and Ted Tice, whose character, we are told, is "loose on him … like clothes he must grow into." Ill fitting or not, Hazzard is obsessed with his character….

Tice is nice … but one can barely discern this from the action (almost nil) or dialogue (a lot of one-liners), so choked is the novel with purple, image-clotted...