LAURA RIDER’S MASTERPIECE, by Jane Hamilton. Grand Central; 214 pages; $22.99
For her sixth novel, Jane Hamilton tries something completely different — a comedy of manipulative bad manners in rural Wisconsin, an area the esteemed author (When Madeline Was Young, A Map of the World, The Book of Ruth) knows all too well — she lives there.
We discover our title character in a state of moral and physical exhaustion. Despite her husband Charlie’s unprepossessing appearance, he is in fact a priapic Superman, who has to express his sexual enthusiasm three times a day: “A night with Charlie was equivalent, both for burning calories and in the matter of muscle groups, to doing the complete regime of the Bowflex Home Gym.”
Laura has come to a momentous decision: She has politely but emphatically closed the bedroom door, in favor of contemplating a career as a writer.

The only problem is that she doesn’t really have a lot to write about, and she doesn’t seem to have a writer’s temperament either. What Laura really wants is to have written without actually going to the considerable trouble of writing, which, I am here to tell you, can cause ugly lines on the forehead.
Although she is through with sex, she is very much interested in love, figuring that if she ever does write, it will probably be about that eternal subject. In a roundabout way, she foments an affair between Charlie and Jenna Faroli, the local NPR host who has recently gone national.
Laura sends out some e-mails posing as her husband, and because she is a bored middle-aged woman, she knows just what note to strike: “Jenna Faroli, Queen of Tartoli/The muse of Men, Women and Mice/She sings, she dances, she makes pasta e fagioli/She’s smarter than Jesus H. Christ.”
Like most people on radio, Jenna’s voice is considerably more alluring than her figure or face, but Jenna is undeniably smart and her sensuality, too, has been put in cold storage by her spouse, a judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Jenna is stunned to realize that Charlie Rider makes her arch her back!
The affair heats up, and Jenna is not the only one; it seems that the people at the NPR station major in cheating; Jenna’s producer is having an affair with one David Oberhaus, who does the half-hour read-aloud segment. When Susie asks for Jenna’s help, she retorts, “Try to find the thrill in sound judgment.”
Soon, Jenna abandons this prim schoolmarm tone and begins arching her back all over rural Wisconsin, while Laura contemplates just what it is that women want. She comes to the conclusion that, in their 20s, “Every woman wanted to couple, to share, and if she was successful in that department, she wanted, by the time she was 40, to be left alone to watch Comedy Central.”
All this is a better set-up for comedy than it is execution. The problem is that all of Hamilton’s instincts go toward depth of character, and depth of character works against comedy, which is essentially an artificial construct that depends on incongruity and timing. There, too, Hamilton’s great gift for naturalistic and moral conflict works against her, and the result is a book that provokes smiles but little more.
Laura Rider’s Masterpiece strikes me as an extended holiday, the sort of book that novelists often set in Paris or Venice as a means of writing off a vacation. It may have afforded Hamilton a much-needed rest, but it doesn’t particularly reward its intended audience. It does, however, compel prurient interest in just what’s going on at NPR during its invariably staid fund-raising efforts — and beyond.