Honestly, I was prepared to be bored and exasperated by this novel about a 40-year-old woman who is an emotional wreck and still at the mercy of her tyrannical, narcissistic parents. The book's protagonist, Kay Sorenson, is a classic doormat, a klutzy, rumpled Northern California librarian and frustrated musician who is unhappily married to Neal, the vague, gray-ponytailed owner of a frame shop. Ida, Kay's imperious, dying but still glamorous mother, pushes her daughter around, while Kay angles pathetically for scraps of attention from Francis, her distracted, equally hard-to-please father. Did I really want to spend a couple of evenings with this crowd?

As it turns out, I definitely did. "Iron Shoes," Molly Giles' first novel after two well-received story collections, is funny and intelligent, and when I finished it I was sad to see its characters go. Well, most of them, anyway: In Ida, Giles has created a true maternal monster, the kind of mother who brazenly steals the spotlight from her daughter by arriving late to her concert and coughing loudly throughout. Yet somehow Ida is a believable monster: a witty, beautiful, thoughtless force field of a woman so unprepared to surrender the advantages of youth that she seems to destroy her own body, as if to spite it. Drinking and smoking furiously, tossing off casual insults between lipstick applications, she bangs herself around and then refuses medical treatment until she has lost both her legs to gangrene.

While she's still alive, Ida sucks up a lot of the novel's oxygen, but she's outrageously entertaining. After her mother's demise, Kay has to figure out how to occupy the center of her own life without becoming as self-obsessed as Ida was. Even when the supposed problem is eliminated, Giles never pretends that such a thing is straightforward. "Iron Shoes" may be the story of Kay's lurching steps toward a belated independence, but as a novel it's always light on its feet -- smoothly and gracefully written, and full of sly humor and wickedly good dialogue.

-- Maria Russo

The Blackwater Lightship
By Colm Toibin
Scribner, 273 pages

A good novelist takes you to places in the imagination that are surprising and new. A very good one can lead you down roads you think you already know, and show you the power and poignancy of the familiar. In his fourth novel, Colm Toibin blends two of modern fiction's most repeated motifs -- the dysfunctional family brought together by AIDS and the wild, changeable landscape of Ireland as a metaphor for its people. But the commonness of the setup isn't a sign of complacency on the part of the author: It's an indication of someone so at ease with the everyday he has no need of theatrics.

At the heart of the novel is Helen, a loving wife and mother but an indifferent daughter and sister, who's jolted out of her selective altruism by the specter of mortality. Her semiestranged brother, Declan, drops the bombshell that he's dying of AIDS, setting in motion a series of events that gather an unlikely set of caretakers under the same roof. As they tend to the feverish, vomiting husk of the man Declan used to be, Helen, her mother, Lily, her grandmother and Declan's gay best friends swap stories of growing up and coming out. They bicker among themselves, and they alternate between insight and misunderstanding. Declan is falling apart: Can the rest of them figure out how to come together?

Toibin captures his characters in the flickering moments that make up a day or a life: brushing hair or pouring tea. A life-and-death drama may be unfolding, but it's in the quiet details that he reveals what's starkly individual about the characters and reassuringly universal about the human condition.This is how we are, he says, gay or straight, sick or well, as we make sense of our families or just make breakfast.

Unlike any number of recent tear-jerkers, too eager to sanctify the sick and their loved ones, "The Blackwater Lightship" allows its characters to be flawed: frequently petty, controlling, fretful and resentful. Yet the story never strays too far in the opposite direction either: This is not yet another literary gathering of multigenerational bad mothers and neurotic men. Instead, this is a tale of regular folk, contradictory as hell, just like most of us. In the end, you can substitute AIDS for any crisis that might visit a family, and the windswept shores of Ireland for your own backyard. Because this is a story of the kind of people who rarely get to be the heroes of novels. They show themselves, when their story is told right, to fit the role just fine.

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"