"Earthly Possessions" … is just another one of those slightly stale, wry books that so many women writers seem to be turning out: A heroine who is a rueful optimist or cheerful pessimist, takes us on a long walk through the world in order to point out its incongruities. A Michelin guide to desolate panoramas, dismal accommodations, poor fare. A woman laughing out of the other side of her mouth….

Charlotte is the nearest thing to a character in "Earthly Possessions," yet she is only a hope chest of negatives, a woman on the run from boredom toward an empty ambiguity. Her mother and father are the caricatures we have come to expect from contemporary fiction, what E. M. Forster called "flat characters." Her father silently takes old-fashioned formal pictures of the people in his small town and her mother is merely fat, as if she could make up...