PERHAPS BECAUSE IT IS WRITTEN with college-educated book buyers in mind, literary fiction these days teems with nice, sensible characters. Oh, sure, they have problems: their marriages turn drab, their careers seem stalled, all their good intentions cannot protect them from the knowledge that they are, every day, growing older. Their response to these travails tends to involve exhaustive introspection and maybe a psychiatrist or a hobby to snap them out of their blahs. They are as harmless as they are uninteresting.
At first glance, the heroine-narrator of Susanna Moore's fourth novel, In the Cut (Knopf; 180 pages, $21), seems to...
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