Recently, American essayist Wendy Steiner characterized contemporary female fiction as being “rich in imagery and emotion, consumed by the desire to recover a lost or hidden past.” Sarah Murphy’s Lilac in Leather doesn’t stray far from the chick lit flock, being concerned with women-friendly subjects such as female friendship and the enchantments of youth. The book’s 400-odd pages are low on action but big on reflection, meaning that every thought, every emotion, every dream, and every revelation is conveyed in vast, puffy clouds of prose.

The tale is told by Alma, a middle-aged woman who looks back at the person who most shaped her existence: her luminous, uncontrollable, artistic soulmate Laura. The two of them are New York-bred, but while the young Alma is reasonably well adjusted, middle-class, and lives with her divorced mother, Laura’s parents are working class, and don’t know what to do with their wild-child androgyne. Early on it becomes clear that Laura – later called Lilac – is mentally damaged to the point of no return, but is nevertheless fated to become one of the most significant artists of her generation. As the two of them grow up Alma watches and nurtures from the sidelines, acquiring a husband and children, while Lilac triumphs with such art works as “Particle Traces of the Menstrual Moment.” Alma wears Birkenstocks, and is given to long reveries about lying in the summer grass as a child. Lilac wears leather jackets and makes inappropriate jokes about the female genitalia. Alma has a brief fling with Lilac’s live-in love Sandro, and is wracked by memories of her betrayal.

This novel has a peculiar rhythm, composed of bitty sentences that balloon into long nets of drifting impressions: the effect would be entrancing if the novel wasn’t so long. The chief problem is the character of Laura/Lilac, who is modelled on a cross between Patti Smith and Judy Chicago, but comes across as a minor, unsubtle practitioner of 1970s womyn’s art. Art history has not dealt kindly with womb-addled visions entitled “Dis.Cunt.In.You. Us, The Discontinuity Continued”(from the book) and neither did this reader.