Though their romance is not as Olympian for readers as it is for the lovers, the couple's dissolution is devastating. Eberstadt limns crisply, achingly, the slow erosion of their marriage, the little sharp-tongued comments that build until the "result is a bloodless scoreboarding: does she get along with your friends, how good's the sex, does he talk about his feelings. Sexuality being something that's not in every glance, every smile ... every FIGHT, but another multilateral treaty -- I'll [have sex] if you do the dishes -- another improving activity, another thing to 'work on.' "

In myth, there are hideous creatures to slay. In Eberstadt's novel, the creatures are within us. We carry the germ of our own ruin -- and the ruin of the person we love. We must not provoke these creatures, her tale reminds us, for they wreak immense damage: "[W]hen you've broken a horse, you've got a ride, but break your lover, and all that's left is your own arid will, a bed turned to rocky soil that will never take the plough."

As tragic as any classic myth, and haunting in its brutality, "The Furies" is an intelligent if disheartening look into the forces at work inside marriage.

Bernadette Murphy

*

Genesis

A Novel

Jim Crace

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 246 pp., $23

There are writers -- though not many -- who permanently alter the way you view even the most quotidian subject. Anyone who's read Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" will never again regard a shoelace as just a bit of string. Similarly, anyone who's read Jim Crace's "Being Dead," winner of the 2000 National Book Critics Circle award, will no longer think of a corpse as just a body that has ceased to breathe. And after reading Crace's latest, "Genesis," chances are your conception of conception will also mutate. Jim Crace is one of the most stunningly original novelists writing today. In "Genesis," Crace shifts his biological focus from the end of human life to its very beginning. This time, his subject is the nexus of love, sex and biology, as they contribute to this most unpredictable and contradictory occurrence, at once so fleeting and yet having such lasting consequences. He dazzles readers with a fresh, wry slant on something that happens anywhere and everywhere, eon after eon: new life.

-- Heller McAlpin

*

Good Faith

A Novel

Jane Smiley

Alfred A. Knopf: 424 pp., $26