When the central character in Lolly Winston's second novel, published just two years after her best-selling debut "Good Grief," repeatedly imagines vacationing in Hawai'i, it's difficult not to hope for her escape.

After all, a 40-year-old international employee relations lawyer who, after a series of failed in-vitro fertilization sessions and one miscarriage, feels "like a malfunctioning farm animal that needed to be put down," definitely deserves a break.

Even though Winston has the experience to write about the Islands, having once lived here for eight years, and though Elinor is "a little too rough around the edges for suburbia," the book and Elinor remain loosely settled in San Jose, Calif. There Elinor confronts her childless marriage and the suspicion that her husband, Ted, is having an affair with Gina, the young nutritionist from the gym.

This conflict provides the novel's seductively voyeuristic opening, when Elinor surreptitiously follows Ted and Gina until they fall to the kitchen floor of Gina's house to have sex, underscoring an intimacy Elinor and Ted have long since abandoned because, as Elinor sees it, "sex only leads to disappointment." This pleasurably uncomfortable beginning, delivered in Winston's crisp and simple prose, carries the story forward with the kind of graceful narrative evolution that earned her debut so much acclaim. It also makes it easy to weather some initial tense confusion and an inexplicable discussion of e-mail spam before Elinor overhears Ted and Gina on the phone.

If early on Winston makes it clear that Elinor must navigate this heartrending situation, then the novel must explore how Ted contributed to the demise of their commitment. Though aware of his error of infidelity, Ted has the strength to question if he truly is "entirely at fault."

Fault is just one issue that Winston explores — and the characters wrestle with — throughout the story's almost unbelievable turns of events, injecting the novel with surprising depth.

This depth is also achieved through an omniscient narrator, who reveals Elinor's and other characters' "churning inner monologue[s]."

Winston first brings us close to Ted and Elinor, and then just when it gets comfortable, plunges into Gina's point of view. While at first Gina's thoughts may be unpalatable, her perspective becomes central to discerning what really happened to their marriage.

When the perspective of Roger, Elinor's house cleaner, is added later on, it also seems to disrupt the steady triangle Winston develops, but it is Roger who introduces another central question: "Are people happy here?" In the suburbs, with their nice houses and cars?

What these varied and rotating narratives really do is allow Winston to deftly play with perception, raising issues of how we see ourselves, how we see others and how others see us. The subtle emotion of flawed yet intensely real characters who evoke compassion — one has to love Roger's strange but well-meaning habit of leaving things in clients' beds to inspire them — elevates what could have been just another women's novel about an affair and childless marriage.

The book's main focus on Elinor, though, serves it well, for her dry wit aids Winston in evading heavy introspection and delivering humorous observations, as when Elinor notes while spying on Ted and Gina that their grocery bags are "paper, not plastic."

Winston's clever reflection does not sting, but simply pokes light fun, such as the low-carb humor woven throughout, subtly mocking the American diet craze. It also gives room to kindly comment on the disconnection of modern society, as when Elinor realizes "they've had to outsource their entire marriage — first the sex part, and now the love part," to doctor's clinics and therapist sofas.

Winston's poise is betrayed at times by redundancies in the book, which belie a lack of confidence in the reader. Had she trusted that one will remember that the doctor told Elinor her infertility may just be due to age, that she has a penchant for letting her inbox overflow and that she has a neighbor with breast cancer, the flow of her story would have been nearly seamless.

But these are small ripples in an otherwise capable, smart and poignant story illuminating the internal struggle to do the right things in life at the right times. If that isn't possible, as it often is not, Winston keenly suggests, "maybe before you can fix something, you have to let it break completely."