You snooze . . .

Meg WOLITZER'S 1982 debut novel, "Sleepwalking," focused on the painful transition to adulthood of three college women who share an unhealthy fascination with suicidal female poets. Her eighth and newest, "The Ten-Year Nap," is an exploration of the somnolence that overtakes the lives of four middle-aged New York City mothers who have opted out of careers to stay home with their children. Wolitzer's titles may evoke images of slumber, but this penetrating prober of family dynamics has hardly been dozing these last 26 years.

After her string of early novels exploring unconventional relationships and intense female friendships, Wolitzer's last two books were a wake-up call to readers, making it clear that she's more than just a pillow-fighter on gender issues. "The Wife" (2003) was a startling story about a 1950s marriage in which a talented woman took the role of helpmate to extremes, ghostwriting her less-talented husband's prizewinning books. In "The Position" (2005), the children of the authors of a "Joy of Sex"-type manual cope with fallout from the sexual revolution. The underlying theme of both is an idea expressed by a character in the new novel: that women have been given "a raw deal in society."

"The Ten-Year Nap" is more topical, focusing on the so-called opt-out generation -- the much-discussed phenomenon of educated professionals (often daughters of feminists who fought for the right to work outside the home) who quit their jobs after having children. Is this the perk of women with wealthy husbands or a self-inflicted raw deal?

Because so many have spent time tossing and turning in this feminist hotbed, including New York Times columnist Lisa Belkin, who has made women's issues her focus, the issues feel somewhat rumpled, less than fresh. Wolitzer tries mightily to add starch. Her writing abounds with lovely images that capture her characters' lives -- the "spackling of peanut butter onto bread" or coaxing "the last of the sunblock from the snouts of bottles." But "The Ten-Year Nap" often sags like an old mattress with the weight of its characters' earnest discussions about ambition, aging and societal expectations.

Three of the novel's protagonists are friends with 10-year-old sons in the same tony all-male Upper East Side private school. It's the sort of place where fourth-graders learn Latin, a world skewered in the movie "The Nanny Diaries" and Ayelet Waldman's book "Love and Other Impossible Pursuits." Wolitzer's goal, however, is understanding, not satire, and her focus isn't hyper-parenting: It's what the absence of purpose does to educated, formerly ambitious women.