Paulina Simons: The Girl in Times Square

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

Simons' sixth novel takes us away from the war-torn Russia of The Bronze Horseman and The Bridge to Holy Cross, and back to where she started with her first blockbuster Tully, the United States of today.

Lily, 24, lives with her flatmate Amy in a tiny fifth-floor apartment in lower Manhattan. She's broke, hasn't managed to graduate from college where she's studying art, and her boyfriend has just left. She's living a laconic kind of life, liking only to sleep late and paint. "The most interesting things in Lily's life happened to other people, and that's just how Lily liked it," we're told.

Well, that's about to change, of course. First, she wins the New York lottery, but for most of the novel her ticket remains unclaimed, tacked to her wall, as she cringes from the idea that fate has somehow fingered her and that her win is only a portent of trouble.

Second, Amy goes missing, bringing into Lily's life the enigmatic detective Spencer Patrick O'Malley from the missing persons bureau - as secretive but strangely, idiosyncratically alluring as Lily herself.

Third, Lily becomes unimaginably ill. Fourth, her horrible, dysfunctional family is falling apart, her mother an hysterical alcoholic, her congressman brother a suspect in Amy's disappearance, her sisters unbearable, her grandmother harbouring secrets from the brutal war days in her native Poland.

In short, there's a lot of plot going on, and some pretty powerful characterisations, too - quite enough to satisfy Simons' more than 20,000 New Zealand fans, who'll be stampeding to buy this very readable novel.

Simons is a most unusual writer, hard to pigeonhole, just as this novel is hard to pin down. Murder mystery? Political thriller? Medical saga? Family saga? Morality tale? Dark literary exploration of urban isolation and loneliness? Love story? It's all of these, and Simons has a voice for each and every genre - which can be a bit unsettling.

Hard to believe the same writer who can write so movingly and with depth about the "crying room" that each person carries within them, and about quite philosophical matters to do with humanity in the modern world, can also write so childishly about SEX (yes, in capitals, so breathless is the writing), and then subject us to learned and quite didactic tracts about Russian political theorists.

However, it's a formula that seems to work. Like Lily with her paintings, one feels that Simons expresses her own passions through her storylines, and that she's written it fast and compulsively. Which is fitting, because that's just how it needs to be read.

HarperCollins $34.99