'TIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG

From Dart (The Boys in the Mailroom, Beaches), a bland, psychologizing and clichÉ-ridden novel that poses the uninteresting question: Can a funny, middle-aged Jewish woman find happiness with a younger, WASPy Republican? At 37, R.J. Misner has just about given up on men. ""You told me to date,"" she tells her friend, ""I dated an agoraphobic, a pathological liar, an adulterer, a narcissist, a paranoid, and a serious doper. You're right. I should have been more open. I haven't been out with a manic depressive or an axe murderer. Why close the door to those possibilities?"" But just when all seems lost, R.J. meets David Malcolm. Because he is rich, handsome, 29, and seems to care about her, R.J., a Los Angeles-based TV comedy writer, decides they have ""about as much chance for romance as the coyote and the roadrunner."" But David persists, and after many long-winded chapters about their childhood pains and losses (the deaths of all four parents are tiresomely recounted), a trip to Paris and some objections from David's ultra-conservative father, the two find true (and one assumes lasting) happiness. Their saga ends when David's father, his rigidity softened by heart trouble, attends the bar mitzvah of R.J.'s son. Dart was a television writer, and this is strictly situation comedy stuff--people reduced to their neuroses, crises that are really just misunderstandings, and a happy ending that is all-too-predictable.