I SOMETIMES FEEL - and please forgive the gross oversimplification - that when it comes to engaging a reader, there are just two types of novels. First, there are the mysteriously deft ones that convince you from Page 1, exerting some magical force that arrests all critical powers. And then there are those that earn your attention more gradually, beating you into submission through the sheer energy, quantity and scope of their detail. However hard you try to resist, they won't let go. "O.K.," you shout - hands over ears - "I believe you, I really do, and I care!" It should not be read as criticism to say that Jean Thompson's new novel, "She Poured Out Her Heart," falls firmly into the second category. Two women meet at college in their freshman year. Jane, having just unceremoniously lost her virginity to a stranger at a party, is feeling down, and Bonnie's easy, wisecracking cynicism buoys her up. They become roommates, and the seeds - and tone - of a lifelong friendship are sown. A decade or so later, as the main action of the novel opens, Jane is married to a handsome, successful cardiac surgeon named Eric and has the requisite two kids, while Bonnie, now working with the police in crisis intervention, lives the classic singleton's life of "high drama and dingy heartbreaks." But although Jane may appear to be the more timidly conventional of the two, she has her flaky side. Increasingly, she experiences strange "flashes" when she not only feels she can glimpse the future but, most disconcertingly for those around her, seems to absent herself mentally for minutes at a time. Rather solipsistically, she accepts, even welcomes, these episodes of being "not there anymore" as something mystical, even "exceptional." Her husband, understandably, worries that she may be depressed. However, when a doctor suggests she could be experiencing epileptic seizures, he seems happy to delay any further testing: Jane is, after all, pregnant, and that could be a contributing factor. It's only a matter of time before the episodes crescendoin spectacular fashion. Walking out of the house during a Christmas party, Jane removes her clothes and lies naked in the snow. It's while she's recovering from this apparent breakdown that Bonnie and Eric begin an affair. And all of a sudden, Thompson's novel turns into something far more unexpected and gripping. Just when you're beginning to be tired (as poor old Eric must be) of Jane's perpetual blanking out, just when you can't decide whether this is a fictional investigation of the mystical, the marital or the medical, the narrative ramps up a notch and turns into that most engrossing of beasts, a novel about sex. And not just the urgent physical event of adulterous sex - though that's wonderfully well described, shot through with guilt and risk and yet presented entirely without mawkishness or sentimentality - but also its interminable emotional navigations and negotiations, the deceit and the guilt, the quotidian tug of war between desire and (in Bonnie's case anyway) loneliness. Not for one moment do you doubt the attraction, both physical and emotional, between Eric and Bonnie. But just as unhesitatingly, you also believe in their deep affection for, and sense of responsibility to, Jane, who by her own admission has never been "a physical person" and who "understood there was such a thing as passion ... much in the same way that she understood there was such a thing as arithmetic." But this is all about to change. And although it would be giving far too much away to say exactly how, it's a change, written with Thompson's typical verve and gusto, that's as unlikely and outlandish as it is utterly, enjoyably convincing. For by now, having initially resisted the prolixity of her meanderings, I confess I'd drunk the Kool-Aid and was relishing every page. And yet, maybe precisely because of that prolixity (this seemingly slender story runs to 400-plus pages), this is still a perplexingly patchy piece of work. The prose ranges from the lithe and acute - Thompson is wonderfully adept at evoking the self-deluding way men and women think about themselves and one another - to the all too frequently laborious. A funeral described in excess, yawning detail toward the end of the book serves only to lose crucial narrative pace. But an earlier trip to the zoo, when Jane insists that Bonnie join her family outing (resulting in an excruciating day for the clandestine lovers), is vivid and engrossing, fascinatingly extended and absolutely earning its quantity of pages. Meanwhile, too many conversations go on too long, with no particular emotional content or outcome. New characters, who later turn out to be insignificant, are described in what feels like a fuss of detail. And when people say "well, screw him" or "screw you," it begins to seem not so much vernacular as just plain lazy. Maybe most disappointing of all, Jane's blank-outs never truly earn their narrative keep. Whether seizures or premonitions, they lend the novel little forward momentum. In fact, cut these red herrings altogether, and it's possible you'd be left with a more robustly complex piece of work. "The good thing about you," Jane very perceptively says to Bonnie, "is that you own up to all kinds of awful behavior. The bad thing is, you think that owning up is enough." It's tempting to feel there's a similar tension at work in this novel: a little too much of the writing and not quite enough of the subtext that ought to lurk beneath. Thompson's novel probes matters mystical, marital and medical - but mostly sexual. JULIE MYERSON'S most recent novel is "The Stopped Heart."

A woman discovers her husband is having an affair with her old college roommate. Can this marriagekids, depression, and allbe saved?In college, Jane was the timid, unassertive type while Bonnie was the sarcastic extrovert with an affinity for bad-news men. An opposites-attract dynamic made them fast friendsthey bonded immediately after Jane's dispiriting loss of her virginity at a frat party. In adulthood, though, things are complicated. Bonnie uses her quick wit as a crisis intervention counselor for the Chicago Police, but her best romantic prospect is a bartender with a coke habit. Jane is married to a doctor, Eric, and has a son and another baby on the way, but she's going off the rails emotionally, experiencing rapturous mental breaks ("oh lovely pure nothing") that may be epilepsy or, she thinks, a curious capacity for premonition. Either way, Jane's baffling suicide attempt pushes Eric and Bonnie into each other's arms and prompts Jane to wonder if such an arrangement might actually be good for the marriage. Thompson (The Witch, 2014, etc.) works to elevate this story beyond its familiar infidelity-in-the-burbs setup by avoiding pat moral judgments; she's more concerned with the dynamics that prompt affairs than thundering about consequences. And both Jane and Bonnie are well-crafted characters, reflecting Thompson's consistent knack for capturing the emotional seas within seemingly conventional middle-class Midwesterners. (She's also excellent at depicting children, so often an afterthought in such novels.) But Thompson seems at a loss to figure out what to do with the characters after Jane's breakdown; Jane makes an unpersuasive and contrived romantic decision as Thompson abandons the more mystical element of Jane's mindset and her odd musings "about the death of the self and the all-encompassing spirit." Good for her, but less good for a novel that slackens into familiarity. An overly domesticated marriage-gone-bad story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Following her canny variations on fairy tales in The Witch (2014), Thompson resumes her excavation of the fraught psychology underlying everyday life in her seventh novel, a tale of besieged friendship between two very different women. Quiet and watchful Jane and edgy and outspoken Bonnie meet in college, then take divergent paths. Jane becomes a doctor's wife and a vigilant, full-time mother in the suburbs. Bonnie lives precariously in Chicago, channeling her hidden anguish into her crisis-intervention work, while conducting toxic love affairs. Both women are scathingly witty and secretly lonely and infuriated, and their already strained bond is about to undergo the most corrosive of tests. As Jane suffers breakdowns that deliver mysterious fugue states and moments of unnerving prescience, passion ignites between her husband and Bonnie. As always in her enveloping fiction, Thompson portrays characters of thorny charisma and complicated failings caught in predicaments both ludicrous and archetypal. She is also proficient in creating lashing dialogue and diverse settings and scenes electric with emotional and sensuous specificity and stinging revelations. Amid intimate disasters and holidays gone bizarrely wrong, all conveyed with piercing empathy and incandescent humor, Thompson considers the riddles of sexual passion and love, self and change, loyalty and forgiveness, forging an engrossing novel of crackling insights and ambushing drama.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist

Bonnie and Jane have been best friends since college. Now in their late 30s, they find their lives wildly dissimilar. Jane, dulled by her two-child marriage with her kind and loving doctor husband, Eric, finds periodic relief with blissful, unsettling episodes of "whiting out" before returning to consciousness. Bonnie, a tough, effective social worker, is a nonstop romantic train wreck, taking up with one hopeless boyfriend after another. Jane snaps while hosting a Christmas party and nearly freezes to death while lying naked in the snow. That night she is hospitalized, thus paving the way for Eric and -Bonnie to cross the final taboo line of friendship. Lies, cover-ups, disinterest, recriminations, and Jane's determined -courage to make her way forward to a rich new reality redefine the lives of all three characters. VERDICT National Book Award finalist Thompson (Who Do You Love) has written a compelling cautionary tale of the consequences of people who trap themselves in the cycle of ill-suited relationship decisions, expecting different results, and who then find sweet freedom in the power of the honest reset.-Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

National Book Award-finalist Thompson (Who Do You Love) illustrates the sometimes-ugly complexities of women's friendships in an account of a decades-long relationship between two very different women. After graduation, college friends Jane and Bonnie quickly settle into the roles they were seemingly born to play: Bonnie becomes a supportive wife to her medical student husband, Eric, and a supermom to their two children, while Bonnie continues her pattern of sleeping with all the wrong men and drinking too much while still excelling professionally. But both of them have secrets: Bonnie longs for the kind of domestic stability Jane (supposedly) has, while Jane dreads sex and welcomes occasional episodes in which her mind goes blank. A particularly troubling mental break for Jane creates new stresses on her marriage and her friendship with Bonnie, leading to further tension. The novel's spiritual overtones offer an unconventional outlook on love and transcendence, but ultimately this too-baggy novel lacks narrative focus, attempting to delve into too many aspects of personal histories and motivations (particularly Bonnie's) while failing to sustain a revenge plot, one that also happens to be hard to believe. Nevertheless, Thompson's many fans will still find moments of clarity and insight in this parallel character study. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.