A brazen look at love and trauma

The opening premise of ``A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" is simple: On that fateful morning in New York City, Joyce Harriman's business trip to San Francisco is cancel ed, and her estranged husband Marshall -- with whom she and their children continue to live in rancorous discomfort -- is late for work at the World Trade Center. Both survive the horrors unscathed, but for a brief few hours, each believes the other has been killed -- and they're thrilled about it. Already, Kalfus, known for his playful departures from realism, has ditched the plausible. The cartoonish villainy of Joyce 's and Marshall's reactions may make a broad comical point about the bitterness of divorce; but it also strays pretty far from anything like human nature. Although guilty relief might be part of the complex of emotions experienced by such characters in such a situation , here there is no recorded complexity at all.

From this bathetic drama, the novel lurches into a rollicking and often outright farcical account of Joyce's and Marshall's attempts to sabotage each other and to lay triumphant claim to their all-precious Brooklyn apartment. There are, along the way, some entertaining set pieces: the anthrax scare at Joyce's office; Marshall's hapless attempts to ruin his wife's retirement portfolio while the stock market plummets; Joyce's horrendous supermarket trips with the children, Victor and Viola; Marshall's wild night in pursuit of Viola's nursery school teacher; and so on. Then there is the wedding in Connecticut of Joyce's sister Flora. Reminiscent of ``Meet the Parents" and a dozen other slapstick films, it takes an almost painfully broad brush to paint Joyce and Flora's parents as antediluvian anti-Semitic WASPs, while Flora's intended, Neal, newly in touch with his Judaism, embarks with his brother on a parodic marathon search for a chuppah. It's all very silly indeed.