While it sounds as though it belongs on the Harlequin Romance rack, "A Spanish Lover" is no bodice ripper.
A romance, yes, but a romance in which real life - with all its hopes, disappointments and everyday annoyances - intrudes at shockingly frequent intervals.
But if every now and then real life is generous enough to throw us a dizzying love affair, why not?
Fans of England's Joanna Trollope, a descendant of the prolific Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, know that real life is her bread-and-butter as a writer. She writes readable novels about real people, with real foibles, real desires and the real capacity to act in surprising, even churlish, ways. An appealing dash of soap opera enlivens her books, which include "The Men and the Girls," "The Rector's Wife" and "The Choir," the last two of which have been dramatized on "Masterpiece Theatre." Trollope has a wonderful way with characterizations, possessing the facile ability to sketch an outline in a few quick strokes and then vividly flesh out her portrait as the book goes along.
She does something intriguing, character-wise, in "A Spanish Lover." Her two main characters are twin 37-year-old sisters, identical physically, but as unalike emotionally as the average man and woman. She does a deft job differentiating the fecund Lizzie Middleton, an overachieving "supermom," from her unmarried twin, Frances Shore, who owns her own business, a small travel agency.
Frances is the more interesting twin, at least initially, because she is the more mysterious, the more elusive, the more emotionally remote.
Lizzie feels vaguely sorry for Frances, because she is single. Lizzie thinks Frances must be unhappy, and in one way, this satisfies Lizzie because it keeps Frances somehow vulnerable and therefore attached to Lizzie. And yet Frances, who is quite astute, knows that she and her sister are two separate beings.
"We are twins, so we are a unit," Frances thinks, "we have a kind of joint wholeness, together we make up a rich, rounded person, but we are like two pieces of a jigsaw, we have to fit together, and to do that properly we can't be exactly the same shape."
As Frances' mother observes, Frances is "an unsuitable person to be a twin." In "A Spanish Lover," "sensible" Frances proves that she is indeed her own person, and in doing so she shakes up the status quo, alarming her family with her sudden plunge into a love affair with a man she meets in Spain.
Luis Gomez Moreno is charming and gorgeous. He is also 10 years older than Frances, married (but long separated from his wife), Catholic and "a foreigner." With things going swimmingly for Frances, life abruptly falls apart for Lizzie and her husband Rob. For many years they have owned a successful gallery that specializes in trendy crafts. But with the economy in the doldrums, the gallery is faltering, and the bank now wants the Middletons to repay a huge loan on their beloved old home, the Grange.
Rounding out the family portrait in "A Spanish Lover" are the lively brood of Middleton kids - convincingly portrayed by Trollope, from their bouts with chickenpox to their bouts with teenage obnoxiousness - and Frances' and Lizzie's parents, William and Barbara.
Barbara once ran off to Marrakesh when the twins were 10, and she's been brooding ever since she returned a few months later. Lovable but passive William has carried on by keeping a mistress on the side, whose existence is acknowledged by all.
Frances, by now deeply in love, decides to get pregnant, against Luis' fervent wishes. How will the various domestic crises resolve themselves in "A Spanish Lover"?
The answer is best expressed in the words of William, who believes "that nothing lovely was ever, somehow, wasted, even if it came to an end." Like her previous books, Trollope's newest novel is commercial fiction topped with a dollop of sophistication.