CATHERINE DUNNE's first novel comes packaged with several subterranean messages. It gets a ringing endorsement from Roddy Doyle on the back cover; the author's biography tells us that Dunne teaches a Greendale Community School, where Roddy Doyle himself worked before quitting the day job to write full time; and he and Duane share the same publisher.

The reader might be forgiven for wondering whether In the Beginning is being presented as the female wing of the Roddy Doyle school of dirty realism. If so, it's quite a legacy to bear for a first time novelist. And the associations are misleading, since Catherine Dunne explores very different territory to that which Doyle writes about.

In the Beginning is firmly set among the affluent Dublin middle classes - good bottles of white wine in the fridge, BMWs in the driveway. The plot is the stuff of cliche - the scorned, domesticated wife who makes it on her own with the kids when her go getting husband leaves her for another woman. The fact that Dunne makes her own of such material is a tribute to her breezy confidence and firm writerly control.

Dunne has written a page turner, a compelling if unadorned account of Rose, a 42 year old housewife whose husband, Ben, calmly announces in the opening pages that he is leaving her, initially for time to think. At this stage poor Rose is so shell shocked she doesn't even consider the obvious - that there is another woman in the picture.

In alternate chapters Dunne explores an incident from Rose's youth or early marriage as a counterpoint to her present predicament - an absent husband who has left her and three bewildered offspring all but penniless.

Dunne is particularly good on Rose's encounters with her children, but the courtship scenes border on the novelettish - "Rose thought she would die of love."

However, Dunne manages, in the brief vignettes interleaved with a diary of Rose's first fortnight alone, to reveal the slow and quiet disintegration of the relationship with Ben.

In the Beginning is packed with incident - too packed, perhaps. It bounces along with barely time to draw a breath as Rose takes on the world, finds a job in catering, bonds with all of her three children, tackles the bank manager, asserts herself when Ben tries to come home, discovers the solidarity of female friendship and gets through several dozen bottles of the chilled Chardonnay.

But there are casualties in Dunne's urgent narrative - casualties of the imagination. There are moments in the midst of her sturdy prose when one gets a glimpse of Dunne's capacity for the apt, striking image:

Standing out there at the window, he watches Rose. She is hanging out clothes. She is struggling with a large white sheet. The sheet from their bed. The wind whips it away from her for a moment. Then, in a savage gust, it wraps itself around her. Rose struggles to free herself from its stinging wetness.

The scene disturbs Ben for a reason he does not understand. For a moment he is moved to go and help her. Then he feels annoyed ... Abruptly, he turns away from the window...

But too often Dunne squanders the stark poetry of such moments in pursuit of the railroading narrative. There is a feeling too that fictional possibilities have been surrendered to the dogged detailing of events - as in the loss of a baby early on in Rose's marriage, or her interesting but underdeveloped relationship with her dead mother, who pervades the book in a series of homely catch phrases.

Granted, the novel is primarily the story of a woman coping with crisis, but if Dunne had given way to her reflective impulse and granted a voice to the lyrical, interior life of her characters, In the Beginning might have been not only an edgy, fast paced social documentary but a more subtle, complex and interesting novel.