A tragic tale of Sept. 11, but one that’s poorly told

Aside from her 1992 novel “To Die For,” adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman, Joyce Maynard is perhaps best known for her memoir “At Home in the World,” which detailed her former relationship with J.D. Salinger -- begun in 1972 when she was a freshman at Yale. Although the famously reclusive author was not the only subject of her book, that aspect of it stirred up a good deal of attention. Some criticized Maynard for exploiting Salinger, while others delighted in her revelations about his many curious habits and occasional cruelty.

Maynard’s new novel, “The Usual Rules,” takes its subject matter yet again from a controversial source: Sept. 11. The story focuses on a precocious 13-year-old girl named Wendy, whose mother goes to work that morning and never returns.

Until that horrific day, Wendy lives contentedly in Brooklyn with her mother, Janet, stepfather, Josh, and younger half-brother, Louie. It’s been almost three years since Wendy has seen her biological father, Garrett, an artist living in Davis, Calif. Whereas Garrett is an unreliable, absent figure, Josh is a patient, devoted father with “the kind of face you’d like to see if you had a problem.”

Janet had named her daughter for the “Peter Pan” heroine who “at the darkest moments ... never gave up hope.” True to her namesake, after her mother goes missing, Wendy is most concerned for the welfare of 4-year-old Louie, who asks, “Does God know about this?” after seeing footage of a bloody firefighter on television. Rather than erupt in bouts of rage or tears, Wendy feels numbness: “The whole world, everything around her, had turned flat and colorless.”

After phoning her father to let him know that Janet is among the missing, Wendy expects nothing further to come of the brief conversation. So it’s a shock when Garrett shows up at her apartment a few weeks later and insists on bringing her back to the West Coast with him. This twist is made more implausible by Josh’s letting her go with Garrett, who has a history of erratic behavior. “I would tell you it breaks my heart to see you walk out the door,” Josh says. “But everyone here is heartbroken anyway. Maybe your best shot is getting out of here.”

Adjusting to life with her father is hardly easy; Garrett’s idea of stocking the family cupboard includes beef jerky, a package of turkey slices and an array of Healthy Choice dinners in the freezer. Not knowing how long she’ll stay with her dad, Wendy spends her days skipping classes and wandering around town. Among her new friends in Davis are Alan, the kind owner of a local bookshop where she enjoys hanging out -- he introduces her to the pleasures of Carson McCullers’ work -- and a single teenage mother named Violet.

As Wendy floats aimlessly through her days, unable to fully face the pain of her loss, so too does the novel drift. The author’s efforts to offer an “authentic” sense of a teenage girl’s interests and concerns seem stilted; for instance, references to pop icons such as Christina Aguilera and Sade are incorporated uneasily throughout.

It’s a minor quibble but distracting: In one scene, Violet notes that Madonna wears “23 different outfits” during her concerts. Wendy spots in a magazine article that “if you wanted to see Madonna on the Drowned World Tour, tickets cost three hundred dollars a piece.” What these girls express excitement about doesn’t sound like what actual teenage girls are enthusiastic about but the author’s own notions of that demographic.

The compelling passages in “The Usual Rules” come when Wendy grapples with her recurring trauma, and with being so far away from Josh and Louie. In those moments, Wendy doesn’t seem like a mouthpiece for the author’s interests and ideas but a girl contending with profound and overwhelming emotions.

She realizes that 50 years from now, her mother might have been “a 90-year-old woman, just getting around to dying,” and that many others lost on Sept. 11 could have also lived to be that old. In another moment, it occurs to Wendy that she “had begun to lose her mother that day in September, but it was still happening, a little at a time, as if she had been on a little boat that was very gradually drifting out to sea, or holding on to a balloon that kept on rising, till you couldn’t see it anymore.”

In such moments, Wendy’s spirit, complexity and passion are evident, and she is someone we care about. But part of the problem with “The Usual Rules” is that Maynard seems to want readers to root for all of her characters. Garrett may be a deadbeat dad, but he concedes his failings to his daughter, expresses a desire to change and explains that his own father was a poor role model. Violet is a troubled teen who utters beatific lines about the transformative power of motherhood, including its ability to end her shoplifting habit because “I wanted to be a good role model.” Josh is loving and earnest; Louie is innocent and adorable. Hearts of gold abound.

Also, despite some affecting moments, the novel does not seem worthy of using Sept. 11 as its framework. Although the passages on responses to the attacks are well-researched and handled with sensitivity, the novel’s thin characters and dialogue are too much the stuff of TV movies. Ultimately, Maynard’s novel is too disjointed to convincingly tell its tale.

*

The Usual Rules

A Novel

Joyce Maynard

St. Martin’s: 390 pp., $24.95