A novel in first chapters; it sounds an intriguing, possibly brilliant idea. The writer and the publishers clearly think so too because they put it on the cover as a hook, a selling point. Both readers and writers know that the crucial first chapter can be a stumbling block.
But take a multiplicity of first chapters and the problem magically disappears. You don't like that first chapter? Don't worry, the next one may be better, or the next or the one after that . . .
Rabih Alameddine is a Lebanese writer living in San Francisco. This, his second novel, is the autobiography of a Lebanese-American woman called Sarah. Having grown up in an oppressively tight-knit Druze family in Beirut, she is inspired by the family myth that she is named for and resembles the great, the divine Sarah Bernhardt. Tomboyish, charmingly kooky, she experiences the troubles of affluent western life; divorced parents, her own divorce, the frustrations of being neither here nor there as she moves between Beirut and San Francisco, of being unable to live with her family or without them, of finding her way as an artist. There are darker events too in her life, the fact that she was raped, her mother's suicide, a mad sister, another sister killed in the Lebanese civil war; and perhaps worse than any, disillusion about her beloved grandfather who fed her the myth of the divine Sarah.
In the early first chapters, as she tries to find her way into her story, she is egoistic and centre stage. By degrees, as her evolution as a writer mirrors her evolution as a personality, she tries different tactics, exploring the stories of her parents, her sisters, her step-mother. Finally she arrives at the relatively happy conclusion that, much as she would like to , she cannot escape into American individualism. She is bound inextricably to her family and they to her .
Sadly, for all its innovative form and the darkness of the characters and events, this is an unrelentingly featherweight and would-be charming novel. Sarah ends more or less as she begins, a mid-Atlantic hybrid, over indulged, carapaced from tragedy by her self- absorption and self-regard. Like a soap-character, she is forever bursting into tears and protesting the strength of her feelings but remains oddly unmoved and unaffected. One is disinclined to believe her .
And who are the Druze? Sarah's background is an interesting one but we learn little about the Druze except that they are rather fiercely tribal, venerate sons above daughters, like lamb dishes and to have doctors and engineers in the family - just like any other Middle Eastern or indeed Western people. I had to go to a reference-book to find out whether they are Muslim or Christian.
And yet, Alameddine is a fluid and easy writer, with a natural lightness of touch that can be engaging. But he prefers to take the easy option, to be satisfied with surface and charm and happy endings. The first chapter device for instance, far from being ambitious, gives him leeway to glide around his narrative, floating off when the going gets tough. The reader, failing to be surprised by change of tone or voice, soon forgets about the device and reads I, The Divine as a conventional story.
• Anne Haverty's most recent novel, The Far Side of a Kiss, is published in paperback by Vintage
I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters. By Rabih Alameddine. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 308pp. £12.99 sterling