Constrained by a cardboard character

Fiction: Rosy lives in her head, and in her memory.

It can not be all that easy considering she has two rebellious teenage sons, a likeable, engaged husband who still enjoys sex with her, and above all, she has endured an agonising loss. But she survives. Rosy is typical of the brisk, no-nonsense characters who inhabit the tough, determinedly non-literary domestic realism of British writer Julie Myerson's fiction, although she does prove irritatingly self-absorbed.

Late in this new novel, her sixth, Myerson allows one of Rosy's sons to interrupt her as the family gathers about the cat, which has just given birth.

Mother tabby is licking her kittens. Rosy delivers another of her opulent speeches and informs her embarrassed sons, "You were the most beautiful things I'd ever seen, all of you were, you smelled and tasted wonderful. I could easily have licked you all over." Not before time, Jack wakes up and growls, "Christ, Mum . . . do you have to be so detailed about everything?" It is a valid point because by this stage, the characterisation of Rosy, selfish and obsessive, has long since undermined the entire novel.

There is no rule that a character must be sympathetic, but in Rosy, Myerson appears to have created one highly-sexed, intelligent, demanding and emotionally ruthless woman too many. Added to this is the weakness of the portrayal of Rosy's husband, Tom, whose abiding purpose is to worship Rosy - who is, in turn, benevolently well aware of his intellectual limitations.

In fairness to Myerson, she sets out her narrative, and narrator, from the opening sentence. "It begins with snow, the story of you. I've tried so many other beginnings . . . But each time I come zoning back to the house in the most run down part of the city and that freezing black night when we kissed for so many hours. . . Not so young but young enough to imagine we're already pretty old - right bang in the middle of things."

The tone is almost feverish. Rosy, long established in her relationship with Tom - another stock Myerson nice guy with feelings - although they have never married, have had three children together, one of whom, a baby girl, is dead. But Tom, for all his inability to deliver the romantic rhetoric which appears to mean so much to Rosy, appears to work overtime at wooing her, bringing her, a published poet, off to Paris where she is free to fret and angst about the children and her lover from the past, who may or may not be present.

Rosy's thoughts are divided between memories of her greatest romantic encounter - the night she has immortalised in her memory - and the slowly emerging account of how her baby died. Early in the novel, the actual story is rendered academic. Far more interesting is watching the way in which Myerson's blunt, nothing fancy non-style submerges the book. The very device that worked so well in her previous novel, the terrifying Something Might Happen, tends to backfire on the narrative. Whereas that previous novel - not quite a thriller, not quite a mystery, but more an exploration of the potential of evil - is taut and tactile, this new book sinks under the weight of Rosy's ego. Her sexuality is simply insufficiently interesting to carry the narrative. Although intended perhaps as her way of dealing with the loss of her daughter, it never quite convinces.

The Story of You is archly calculated, and for all the domestic detail, the sons are reduced to the role of bystanders, as is Tom the husband, as Rosy pursues an obsession that may be a dream - not that it ultimately matters. It would have taken the light touch of an Anne Tyler or the mystic warmth of an Alice Hoffman to carry this book - and Myerson has neither.

It is disappointing, particularly as her fifth novel, Something Might Happen, proved such a breakthrough for Myerson, In Something Might Happen a local woman disappears. The essential strangeness is brilliantly evoked. The seaside town is small and friendly, a real community, well able to deal with the summer visitors, who don't have much impact and are quickly forgotten. But Lennie is found dead, viciously murdered. Her heart has been ripped out. There is a murder, a mutilated corpse, just no reasons, no killer. Instead Myerson makes clear that this is a story about the way things might happen - and do. In that thesis lies the success of a novel again written in a no-nonsense, heavily detailed prose.

Everything in that book is seen through the eyes of Lennie's best friend, Tess, a weary mother-of-three who is still getting used to a fourth child, the new baby that came as a surprise. She and her husband Mick - a precursor of Tom in the new novel - work hard at being good parents and at living good lives. They seem tired but happy and then, with the news of Lennie's horrific death, their small world begins to fall apart.

Something Might Happen operates as a masterclass in storytelling, with an array of false leads. Myerson skilfully makes the murder become the focus of conversation and the narrative is sustained by fear .

Her characters inhabit the ordinary and live life as it is. By comparison her new novel is one-dimensional, never progressing beyond Rosy's obsession. It is also further undermined by the banal dialogue, particularly the e-mail love banter carried on between Rosy and her lover from the past.

Even as a couple Rosy and Tom are ill-drawn, their place in society ill-defined. Above all there is no humour, and Rosy's grief is an unconvincing as her obsession.

Her lover from the past is no longer a thin 20-year-old bumming money off other students. Having returned to the US he made his money in banking and is now middle-aged, successful, overweight and a divorced father with a grown son he no longer sees. For this, Rosy is prepared to leave Tom and the boys.

He ignores the practicalities and feeds her ego: "Beautiful girl, why don't you ever look tired? You never seem to eat or sleep and yet you always look exactly the same, why?" He deflects for a time her questions about "our love". Finally, in one of the few moments of real truth in the book, he says, "OK, then, listen up. Passion, what we call falling in love, it's an illusion. It's created entirely by you, don't you see - by the lover. Love is just how we choose to fill the gaps, the way we colour the blank bits, with our imaginations. You have a big imagination, Rosy, But you know that."

The narrative falters into a narrow self-quest compounded by a serious failure of tone. Rosy needs to be sustained, and memory filters that need. Rosy makes no choices, her path is laid for her. As a novel, The Story of You never convinces, because Myerson - among the shrewdest of psychologically directed novelists - doesn't seem to believe in Rosy all that much either.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Story of You By Julie Myerson Cape, 311pp. £14.99