East Egg, Meet Southampton

By JOANNE KAUFMAN

When Danielle Ganek's first novel, "Lulu Meets God and Doubts Him," was published three years ago, it was praised for its clear-eyed and tart (that is to say, catty) look at the New York art world. The book no doubt received a close reading in certain quarters because Ms. Ganek is very pretty and very well placed; she is married to a hedge-fund manager who is also a trustee of the Guggenheim Museum and an impassioned collector.

On the evidence of her second novel, "The Summer We Read Gatsby," it can safely be said that Ms. Ganek has an enviable way with book titles. And perhaps once again she will find an audience among those in the world she describes from first-hand knowledge. This time it's the Hamptons, the seaside summertime playground of well-to-do New Yorkers on Long Island's South Fork. "The Great Gatsby," of course, was set on the island's North Shore, amid towns that F. Scott Fitzgerald gave the names East Egg and West Egg.

The weaknesses lurking in Ms. Ganek's literary debut are, alas, more clearly evident this time around, particularly her shaky sense of storytelling and labored way with a quip. The trouble begins with the novel's very first line: "Hats, like first husbands in my experience, are usually a mistake."

Readers may find themselves stuck at the starting gate wondering how many first husbands the narrator could have bagged, and may find themselves doing emergency repair work on the prose: "Hats, like first husbands, are usually a mistake." In any case, the chapeau-averse narrator is Cassie Moriarty, a divorced 28-year-old would-be writer who likes to spend solitary afternoons reading her favorite book, you-know-what. Fitzgerald's masterwork is mentioned early and often, but to little effect in this story of how Cassie and her half-sister, Peck (short for Pecksland), are thrown together for the better part of a month after the death of their beloved Aunt Lydia. This free-thinking woman and patroness of bad artists has bequeathed them a to-do list (visit every continent; have an affair with a man who doesn't speak English) as well as her dilapidated cottage in Southampton.

Cassie lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Peck lives in New York City; they are separated by more than distance. Cassie is a practical and reticent young woman. Peck wants to be an actress but is already in her early 30s without showing any sign of succeeding; she's large and loose in both dress and manner, the sort never to let facts get in the way of a good story. Feckless Peck wants to keep the cottage, which is called Fool's House, after a Jasper Johns painting. Sensible Cassie wants to sell. How the two women work out their differences is the novel's chief preoccupation.

Attending parties and finding suitable mates are also in the mix. At a Gatsby-themed affair early in the book, Cassie encounters an attractive, confident guy whose "presence was like that of a courtly, well-mannered athlete." He turns out to be Finn Killian—someone she'd met and thought "old and kind of ornery" at 21 but now finds mesmerizing. Will Cassie and Finn end up together? Will Peck take up again with an ex-boyfriend, the rich and uncouth Miles? These questions aren't the sort that would have galvanized Scott Fitzgerald, but they are of vital interest to "The Summer We Read Gatsby"—which is, when all is said and done, chick lit with literary pretensions.

Set in 2009, "The Summer We Read Gatsby" makes veiled references to the looming economic disaster that are perhaps meant to recall Fitzgerald's bleak musings on the American dream. Sorry, but in Ms. Ganek's novel this ominous note feels unearned.