You can't blame Susan Isaacs for not wanting to make her second novel Compromising Positions II, but I can't help it, I do. In Compromising Positions, a fed-up, witty, very likable suburban matron tracks down a killer and in the process discards her sexist husband in favor of a sexy cop. The result was a perfect read—it had romance, feminism, murder, and social satire—and since it came out, I've been waiting for a sequel, starring our heroine and her new love as the Nick and Nora Charles of Shorehaven, Long Island. This is not that book.

In Close Relations, Isaacs gives us another wisecracking, amiably neurotic heroine—Marcia Green, a 35-year old divorced speechwriter for a New York City councilman—and she places her once more between two men, one nice, one not so nice. This time, though, instead of car pools and PTA meetings, the backdrop is a Democratic gubernatorial primary, and the central question is not who killed the dentist, but this: Will Marcia be able to overcome her loathing for her family long enough to see that the man they are crudely and coldly and for all the wrong reasons pushing her to marry is in fact Mr. Right?

It's a premise as contrived as that of any mystery story. Isaacs is a clever writer, though, and diverts us with her sharp observation of the world in which her characters move. (p. 80)

Jerry Morrissey … is the fellow that Aunt Estelle, Uncle Julius, and Marcia's widowed mother all want her to dump: He's Irish—i.e., anti-Semitic, unsteady, prone to violence and drink—and anyway, he'll never marry her. The Green-Lindenbaum clan is easily the crassest, most bigoted Jewish family to appear in print since the Portnoys, and Marcia's need to rebel against them prevents her from seeing the truth: Jerry may be great in bed, but he's conceited and bossy, and he doesn't love her. David Hoffman, on the other hand, is crazy about her, and he's also Jewish, pleasant, smart, kind, and very rich. Will Marcia grow up and grab him? What do you think?

Isaacs's point, of course, is that you don't have to be miserable to be happy. It does, however, help to be rich; in the world of Close Relations, only the very wealthy are reasonable and humane, able, say, to enjoy classical music—everyone else is an ethnic grotesque. That bothered me some, and so did the many moments when Marcia's love for David, who really is very nice, seems indistinguishable from her growing eagerness for the way of life she will lead as his wife. Her belated discovery of the joys of luxury is all very well as far as it goes, but do we really want to call it maturity? A novel—even a fluent, frequently clever one like this—needs more to sustain it than the protagonist's realization that having lots of money is heaven on earth, particularly when you don't have to earn it yourself. If I didn't remember that the heroine of Compromising Positions cast her lot with a lowly policeman, I'd suspect Isaacs of being a bit of a snob.