SECOND DRAFT OF MY LIFE

Even the title smacks of loserdom for a 42-year-old narrator-novelist turned first-grade teacher determined to have a life—in Lewis’s fourth (The Answer Is Yes, 1998), a pale, unmemorable tale.

Sales of San Diego writer Charlotte Dearborn’s self-effacing novels (My Self-Portrait of Someone Else, etc.) have gone nowhere, and when she’s nominated third place for a book award in a category (horror) that she doesn’t write in, she decides it’s time to call it quits and try another field. She breaks with her low-commitment boyfriend, Andrew, moves into her own place with the help of her married-with-kids sister, Emily, and starts a new career as a first-grade teacher. But Charlotte hasn’t counted on the unsupportive teaching staff, who ridicule her for her decision to go into teaching for “the money” (and for her inability to control her class); or on the cute, divorced sixth-grade teacher Rick Barnstable, who wants nothing to do with her dopiness and desperation; or on her unruly class of unpredictable six-year-olds. In flashbacks, we learn of Charlotte’s previous grind as a novelist, the sudden highs of miscalculation by her New York editor, Howard, and her lowest moments facing a public reading with no one there. When she finally decides to introduce some discipline into her new life by imitating a severely upbeat Jane Eyre–like character from an unfinished novel she’s been writing, Janet Greenhill, her destiny turns around. Too late, though, to undo the reader-damage already done by the dominant air of triteness and defeat in Lewis’s own writing, or by her way of proceeding so listlessly as to suppress much of any characterization. The prose is curiously odorless, colorless, and tasteless—conceivably a calculated effect, but not one that works very well. Most noteworthy is the record of Charlotte’s 15-year gyration through New York publishing hoops.

On balance, though, a life with too little life.