RISE AND SHINE, by Anna Quindlen, Random House, 269 pages, $24.95
Because Katie Couric recently left NBC's "Today Show" to anchor the CBS Evening News, Anna Quindlen's novel "Rise and Shine" seems surprisingly current — but the author denies that her character, Meghan Fitzmaurice, was inspired by Couric.
Nevertheless, since Couric is possibly the biggest morning star television has ever seen, the comparison is inescapable — especially since Fitzmaurice later takes a network position interviewing important people.
In terms of personality and family makeup, however, Couric and Fitzmaurice are not alike.
Fitzmaurice hits a wall on national television when she ends an interview with Ben Greenstreet, a man she cannot stand, and finds herself uttering a string of expletives over a live microphone before cutting to a commercial break. (Greenstreet's wife sends her flowers!)
Even though she apologizes afterward, Fitzmaurice doesn't seem contrite enough, and she disappears for a very long time — in fact, for about a third of the novel — to an undisclosed location so she can unwind, swim, read and do things she has not been able to do because of her high-profile career.
In fact, she is gone so long, the network gives up on her.
As a result, the focus of the novel quickly becomes the people around Meghan, especially her sister Bridget, a social worker in the Bronx; Evan, her husband, who tells her he is leaving her before the incident; and Leo, her college-student son.
The clear moral is that people who experience unusual success should never lose sight of the things that matter most. It is a point well-taken.
But the point is simple and the story is simple and the characters are simple, and nothing is ever very exciting or very funny. And this fluffy, lightweight story taken from popular culture stands in cold contrast to the author's best journalistic work.
Quindlen, whose first career was as an insightful writer of political and social commentary for the New York Times, seems curiously out of her element here. This is her fifth book since she left the Times in 1994 to write novels full time, and none of them has come even close to either the popularity or the excitement of her carefully crafted columns.
Fortunately, in 2003, she accepted an offer from Newsweek to write political commentary every other week — and those columns have continued to show Quindlen's writing brilliance and her rare ability to arouse the reader to recognize severe national problems. Much of the time, they are read-aloud masterpieces that ought to win journalistic prizes — and they probably will.
In the meantime, Quindlen has created a conundrum. She continues to spin out the soft, frothy novels she loves more than hard journalism. But she will probably be best-remembered for her expertise as a columnist and is unlikely ever to achieve greatness as a novelist.
Instead of telling the forgettable story of Meghan Fitzmaurice, Quindlen herself ought to be on TV, going head-to-head with George Will and George Stephanopoulos. She ought to be interviewing Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
She ought to be doing political commentary on "The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric"!
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com