[McCauley is an American novelist, educator, and critic. In the following review, he explains why Dear Digby "doesn't add up to the sum of its many appealing parts."]

Life is no picnic for Willis Jane Digby. The heroine and narrator of Carol Muske-Dukes's entertaining first novel, Dear Digby, edits the letters column for Sisterhood magazine ("a bimonthly cross between a feminist Time and a liberated Ladies Home Journal with an all-woman staff"); lately the letters, particularly those from both male and female crazies, have begun to drive her, well, crazy. She's begun to see something of herself and her own perceptions of the world in letters from, for example, a woman who puts cat food in her husband's cereal every morning, or a woman who writes to complain of being sexually harassed by the bald man on the label of a cleaning product. Digby, like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, her literary ancestor, finds these missives from the outer limits of sanity less and less amusing; she begins to take them seriously. On days when she's feeling "in the mood to respond to the Loonies," she dons a tuxedo and a pair of floppy rabbit ears. The outfit makes her feel "like a radio tower … I pull everybody in" and, at the same time, protected. "People look, laugh uncertainly, then watch their step with me."

There's a lot in Digby's personal life that makes her responsive to the off-center letters. She's unsuccessfully married to a successful, vain actor. ("I abandoned you?" she admonishes during one fight. "You abandoned me every time we entered a room with a mirror.") She's recently had a miscarriage and still talks to the baby she's lost. And most of all, the shadow of a childhood friend's accidental death, for which Digby has been held responsible since age 12, looms large over all her life.

But trouble—and the novel's wacky plot—really begin when Digby decides to publish some of the more disturbed letters in the magazine, along with her pithy, sometimes cutting responses. "Why can't our magazine also be for the woman who's gone a little crackers," she asks at a staff meeting, "alone in the rec room at ten A.M., eating Ding Dongs, getting weird?" Thus commences her involvement with a disfigured mental patient named Iris Moss, who claims she's being raped in her hospital bed, and with a sociopathic voyeur who signs his letters The Watcher. "Something has hurt you," he writes. "I can tell as I watch you…. I wish I knew what has hurt you." As it turns out, of course, he does know.

Dear Digby is a blend of social satire, war between the sexes and mystery thriller. In part, the book is a paean to the virtues of having a "crazy safety valve," particularly for women. The unusual letters Digby publishes are intended to show how women who are "not on the political barricades" have found ways to deal with their frustrations. "Male crazies," Digby explains, "come in predictable (often boring) wrappers, but the women are chattier, more distracted from the solemnity of dementia … weirdly hopeful in a hopeless world."

Ms. Muske-Dukes, the author of four books of poetry, has written a novel full of sharp insights and surprising images. At its best (the opening chapter, for example) Dear Digby is driven by a zany comic gusto. She is particularly good at writing amusing hit-and-run portraits: there's Minnie White-White-Goldfarb, the hyper, hyphenated Sisterhood receptionist who's trying to "annex a personal history," and Digby's mother, a failed artist whose paintings are rejected, even by a gallery burglar.

Unfortunately, however, the social satire of the novel gets diluted by some of the more difficult aspects of the plot. An extended confrontation with The Watcher and a courtroom drama revolving around the plight of the mental patient, Iris Moss, are both unconvincing. Ms. Muske-Dukes's originality and wit, so much in evidence else-where, fail her in these scenes. The irony of the early chapters gives way to sentimentality.

If the whole of the novel doesn't add up to the sum of its many appealing parts, Dear Digby does, in its best scenes, throb with oddball life. Digby herself is a winning character—acid-tongued and, of course, more than a little batty.