Rich lives of quiet desperation

“One Sunday Morning” is a little slip of a novel, but wispy stories are Amy Ephron’s stock in trade. Her five previous books, including “A Cup of Tea” and “Bruised Fruit,” held to an equally circumscribed purview and didn’t take more than 200 or so pages to tell their stories (“White Rose,” at nearly 300 pages, being the exception). Her latest novel is a modest morality play about life in the precincts of 1920s Manhattan and the complex thrust and parry of social interaction among a clutch of close female friends.

The narrative is simplicity itself. Four girlfriends, all of them suffering from some paucity of spirit, meet for their semiregular afternoon game of bridge, and they chance upon their friend Lizzie Carswell emerging from the Gramercy Park Hotel with Billy Holmes. This is bad news, as Holmes is engaged to another friend, Clara Hart. Speculation runs rampant among the group; just what is Lizzie up to, and should they tell Clara?

Ephron brushes aside all the well-tended myths about the Jazz Age being an incipient time of enlightenment for women, the era of Josephine Baker and the 19th Amendment. For these characters, the products of good breeding and a certain patrician reticence, urban provincialism prevails. They live in the most exciting city in the world, yet their own lives are hermetic, shunted off. They are controlled by domineering fathers who determine whether they get to go to Europe for the summer or which suitor can cross their thresholds. Despite the gallivanting, a stifling Victorian oppressiveness hangs over the proceedings. This is Edith Wharton territory.

Ephron’s cafe society is a black hole from which nothing escapes, especially scurrilous gossip. Clara Hart’s secret is kept, at least temporarily. But all the women are harboring some kind of secret. Lucy Collins is trying desperately to get married before her pregnancy starts to show. Iris Ogleby is so desperate for a man that she falls in love too easily, while Mary Nell lusts after a gentleman caller whom she can’t have. Better to burrow ugly thoughts and keep up good appearances than to have disparaging words buzz along the circuit of a cosseted social circle.

“One Sunday Morning” is a novel of muted manners. Ephron’s quietly desperate characters never act on impulse, always hold themselves in check. As is her wont, Ephron writes in a lean style that reveals just enough to move the story along. She has a fine eye for opulence, sketching in the book’s grand public and private spaces with just a few brush strokes. At an opera house, Ephron considers the “elaborate chandeliers, the smell of the ladies’ perfume, the sound of the violins and cellos, dichotic, as if they were considering a skirmish.”

The last third of “One Sunday Morning” reveals that nothing is as it seems; the clandestine maneuvering is just so much wasted energy, the well-plotted plans all go astray. Hence, Ephron reveals the haphazard, unraveled nature of even the most well-ordered lives, but she has set up such a potentially rich story line here that the book feels choked off from itself.

Sometimes, a small scale is just enough, but in this case it feels like a tease, as if there’s more to be learned about these complex characters beyond what Ephron has revealed to us. Perhaps that’s for another book.

Marc Weingarten is the author of the forthcoming “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and the New Journalism Revolution.”