Marian Keyes: Angels

By MARGIE THOMSON

Most of us at certain times at least just want to read something that makes us feel good. For guys, that might be something that rings with gunfire and tough talk, to make them feel dangerous.

For girls, it's probably going to be the literary equivalent of a good gossip, a sharing of intimate details about the state of one's love life, wardrobe and credit card, preferably accompanied by more chardonnay than we know is good for us, and perhaps a few naughty cigarettes.

Helen Fielding is a perfect example of this desire substantiated. Marian Keyes, with five million sold of her previous five titles, is another.

I'm late to the Keyes phenomenon. Sure, I see her all the time in the supermarket, those lolly-coloured paperbacks stacked right next to the chocolate bars - all the "shouldn'ts" ganging up on you as you try to leave the shop.

Call me a snob, but I just didn't think they were my thing.

Well, I was wrong. She's terrific. She's the kind of writer people describe as being a "great beach read", but I reckon the place for her is now: in the middle of the year, in the middle of winter, when you've got a cold and you're feeling as if it's all never going to end - now, that sounds like a Marian Keyes situation.

Angels, her sixth book, is light, relentlessly best-friend chatty, funny (laugh-out-loud-so in several places), but with enough astuteness about people and life to provide those necessary emotional shades.

The Romance Reader has complained that this latest lacks the depth of character and story of her earlier works, and one reader review (out of three) on the Barnes and Noble website says it's her worst book (the others thought it was great). But it soared beyond my expectations.

Aficionados will be pleased to spend time again in the high energy, crazy-Irish household of the Walsh family of Dublin. Maggie, you may remember, is the "white sheep" sister of Claire (Watermelon) and Rachel (Rachel's Holiday): the good girl with the job, the nice house, and the husband, Garv, who adores her. Right?

But lately she's been drinking her contact lenses (three times), is having trouble keeping up at work and is waking at 4am worrying - about what, she is not quite sure.

Then a slip of Garv's tongue reveals an affair. A heartbeat later she's also lost her job, and has moved back home to her parents.

It's no wonder that she soon finds herself accepting an invitation from her best friend Emily, a struggling scriptwriter living in Los Angeles.

Maggie's not the first person to flee to LA seeking transformation, of course, but with a personality described by her sisters as "yogurt at room temperature" (sisters!), Maggie's got a lot of proving wrong to do. Thanks to the efforts of Emily's gorgeous friend Lara, Maggie finds herself with a daring new hairdo, and ready to test out some fairly radical social behaviours on some of LA's finest.

There's the mysterious Troy, ominously described as "human teflon" by Emily, to whom Maggie is strangely attracted; and, even more dubiously, Maggie's first-ever love, Shay Delaney, is now an indie producer and very much on the LA scene.

But, most of the time, none of it proves quite the distraction she's seeking from her sense of failure over her ended marriage. The lightness of Keyes' writing belies her understanding of life's complexities and her compassion for the way sadness can destroy a marriage; the ebb and flow of friendship, and of power relationships between men and women and the many ways they find to be cruel to each other; the superficiality and fickleness of Hollywood.

It would be near impossible to write about LA and not be hackneyed - boob implants, face lifts, pet groomers, personal trainers and wacky Californian spiritualism are irresistible whatever the genre - but Keyes has a knack for making everything as fresh and bitey as a Martini.

There are some really nice images for instance, when Maggie stands at a penthouse window surveying LA below her, she "imagines the longing rising into the night sky like steam", and several clever turns of phrase on every page.

I liked "shopping bulimia" - ("It seemed like I was always splurging on stuff, then trying to return it," Maggie says), and her glamorous single friends' handbags being "cornucopias of breaking-news wondrousness".

How about "CDD: compulsive disclosure disorder"?

When the end comes, it's just right, of course. But be careful what you wish for, Emily's nutty spiritual neighbours warn her and, likewise, we're not sure until very near the end what we should wish for Maggie.

Suffice to say, it was always going to be a happy ending, and the strong chord of redemption that we hear in a minor key with bitter-sweet overtones at the close of more literary novels here rings out in brio, all discords unsnagged.

It might not be quite how life is, but isn't it how it should be?

* Published by Penguin, $34.95