Middle Earth

Lucinda Trout is the quintessential New Yorker: put-upon, caffeine-addicted, rent-strapped and desperate to get herself the hell out of the city. A lifestyle correspondent for a Manhattan morning show, Lucinda makes her escape by way of a long-term assignment in Prairie City, a fictional metropolis deep in the semi-rural heart of the Midwest. "Everyone I'd meet in Prairie City would be both interesting and kind," she daydreams, "every conversation meaningful, every gesture sincere, every woman nonanorectic, every man tall and able to fix cars."

Lucinda falls in love with her new home at first sight, and if The Quality of Life Report (Viking; 309 pages), a comic, caustic first novel by essayist and National Public Radio regular Meghan Daum, were any less honest, her story could have ended on page 15. But Daum's bittersweet deconstruction of Lucinda's illusions reads like The Bridges of Madison County etched in acid. Lucinda acquires a boyfriend, an apathetic woodsman named Mason Clay, who while he bears a passing resemblance to Sam Shepard and says "warsh" instead of "wash"--turns out to be both much more and much less than the man of her heartland dreams. Their disastrous romantic negotiations show us not only their own hearts but the heart of a divided America, split not horizontally, North and South, but vertically, into the coasts and the middle. The simple life never looked so complicated.