[In the following review, Bernstein offers a generally positive assessment of How Stella Got Her Groove Back, but states that "the issues for Stella are luxuriously banal."]

Terry McMillan's new novel is like one of those television sitcoms in which a somewhat unconventional family faces the somewhat unconventional plight of one of its members. In this episode, the family member is Stella Payne, an affluent, divorced 42-year-old investment analyst who, trying to put a little excitement back into her life, goes on vacation to Jamaica. There she meets a handsome, gentle, very charming Jamaican and falls in love with him. The problem, which Stella wrestles with for the rest of the novel, is that the man, named Winston Shakespeare, is half Stella's age.

The television people have names for some of the main sitcom genres. There is the dead-mother comedy, for example, in which a father raises the children in the absence of his deceased wife. How Stella Got Her Groove Back is a single-mother comedy. Like the better sitcoms, it has a cast of likable, truculent characters, funny lines, smart repartee and a warm and fuzzy ending. It is a good deal more raunchy than anything that would be allowed on television. It is not deeper or more searching than the average sitcom, no more dramatically powerful than a backyard barbecue, but it is an irreverent, mischievous, diverting novel that at times will make you laugh out loud.

Ms. McMillan's previous book, the wildly successful Waiting to Exhale, made into a movie, was warmly welcomed as an expression of middle-class black female identity. The 'hood—the world depicted by Clockers, Menace 2 Society or Tupac Shakur—was only part of the larger black pageant, Ms. McMillan was reminding us. The larger picture also included middle-class black women with educations, careers and sensibilities who wage a special kind of struggle over the missing ingredients of the affluent life.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back extends Ms. McMillan's excavation of this literary vein. Stella is the owner of a BMW and an expensive house in the San Francisco suburbs; she is a soft touch for her son's requests for money to buy the latest rap CD's; her younger sister is married to a litigator and among her suitors is a judge. But Stella is a rare member of her extended family to experience life at the level of bourgeois anomie. Many others remain in the 'hood. From time to time a relative calls her collect from prison.

Stella's concerns and her consciousness are standard American-suburban, overlaid by the cultural and psychological cues emanating from the experience of being black in America. Her racial awareness is keen and casual at the same time, her reflections often cursory and soon forgotten. When she gets to Jamaica she refuses to go to the nude beach because "I wouldn't want to give white men the pleasure of seeing my black body, considering they used to rape us when we were slaves." She notices, too, when she gets out of the minivan that has taken her from Montego Bay airport to her hotel in Negril, that none of the white people give the driver a tip. She does—$20. "This is like a black thang: You take care of me, I'll take care of you," she explains.

"I basically like most white people as long as they don't act like Nazis or come across like they're superior or richer or classier or smarter," Stella declares, giving expression not to some element in her personal experience but to her awareness of historical oppression. But Stella's main concerns are the stuff of what the movie people call crossover, the transracial interest Ms. McMillan's books inspire. They stem not from being black but from being a woman and from dealing with and needing men.

The issues for Stella are luxuriously banal. Even though she makes more than $200,000 a year, works with a personal trainer who "makes Cindy Crawford look like a zero," and has a man she can call on for "purely maintenance-oriented sex," she is bored and vaguely discontented. "Right now I'm tired of thinking about how uneventful my life has been lately, and I wish I knew what I could do to put the fizz back into it," she declares. Her 11-year-old son, Quincy, has gone off on vacation with his father, which is what enables Stella to take off for Jamaica and to puzzle out her uncommon romantic dilemma.

"What I do know deep down although I keep it secretly secret," she says, "is that I am terrified at the thought of losing myself again whole-heartedly to any man because it is so scary peeling off that protective sealant that's been guarding my heart and letting somebody go inside and walk around lie down look around and see all those red flags especially when right next to your heart is your soul." Stella is far too self-absorbed to be entirely admirable, but she is sassy and bright and her spasms of surliness stem from the vulnerability she tries hard to hide rather than any streak of real meanness.

Her spiky interior thoughts and the spirited, affectionately caustic dialogue she maintains with the rest of the world save her story from triteness, though not always. ("I mean how can we grow if we think we've already arrived at the end?" Stella asks herself near the end of her journey.) Fortunately, Ms. McMillan's ear is generally rather finely tuned. The secondary characters—especially Stella's two sisters and her precocious, empathetic son—are sharply realized.

Ms. McMillan's book, in short, is pretty smooth sailing, rather like Stella's life. Nothing catches very deeply. Quincy is untroubled by his mother's love affair with a near adolescent. Stella's $200,000-a-year job causes her no difficulty (not even when she loses it). Nobody in this book is much interested in anything except sex, love and new acquisitions. It's the American dream realized, Ms. McMillan demonstrating that the black realization of it can be just as slick and anemic as the white.