The impact of Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones' Diary" is evident in Adrienne Eisen's similarly themed new novel, "Making Scenes." When any genre of literature or film enjoys a sample of such success, there follows the inevitable onslaught of works trying, usually with varying degrees of success, to emulate and outstrip it. It happens in the movies-it's the reason we're still suffering the deluge of indefensible teen movies, melodramas with 'epic' backgrounds and war films with an increasing emphasis on mere graphic depiction.

Now it's happening in this specific form of writing as well. There seem to be a number of people who, after Fielding's novel, felt they were given a license to vent through the channels of this genre, one that I don't dare give a name to. I'm willing to admit that "Bridget Jones" might have given voice to uncertainties experienced by many women. However, not only do I not see what needs to be said in "Making Scenes," I flat-out don't know what it's saying.

Like "Bridget Jones," "Making Scenes" deals with a single woman floundering in terms of career, family, relationships and almost every other platitude of life one has the energy to imagine.

But this one goes a few steps further than Fielding's essentially good-humored story: after the first six pages it is clear that the novel is dealing with a sexually ambiguous bulimic who drops out of college to pursue a half-hearted pornographic modeling career and play beach volleyball, all without a speck of emotion evinced. Deep, right?

Well, it might be, but Eisen doesn't let you know. The first half of the novel continues along this vein of detached, erratic behavior on the unnamed protagonist's part. New hobbies are taken up and dropped with the frequency and ease that the character throws up Krispy Kremes.

There's more to our heroine, we discover, than simply the aforementioned-she supplements her income through methodical kleptomania, she sleeps with various men for cash and comfort and she has a petulant and rebellious attitude towards her parents.

Eisen attempts to disguise these clichés and others through the streamlined dryness of her prose. By skimming over these ideas, by pointedly not focusing on them, she acknowledges and, at the same time, asks us to excuse their staleness. And we'd be willing to, I think, if any indication were given regarding the motivation behind the narrator's absurd volatility.

Eisen begins her explanations halfway through the novel, when the narrative is suddenly interspersed with scenes from the protagonist's childhood. Her sexual insecurities and freakish fetishes stem, apparently, from the abuse she received at her father's hands. There are disturbing sequences of odd sexual play between the two of them-in one particularly graphic post-fight incident, we witness him frantically spanking her across his lap until he climaxes.

The increasing frequency of the flashbacks conveys that the narrator's twisted relationship with her father is at the root of many of her insecurities and stubbornly inaccessible emotions.

But there are only fleeting instances in which her present-day behavior and her past seem connected. For example, her self-infliction of physical pain to escape distressing emotions is clearly linked to her father's beatings. But for the most part, the past and the present are two stories simply lacking enough bridges to connect them in our minds with any resonance.

In addition, Eisen does hint at several of her protagonist's interests. She reads obsessively, not discriminating between Dostoevsky and new-age self-help books. Her mania for beach volleyball tournaments isn't simply a disinterested hobby-she aspires to become a professional player. And she loves consuming bagels, though these she can't enjoy as she wishes, as they're difficult to throw up.

But we know these are not transitory preferences only because she engages in them with a lasting frequency-never can we glean through the wry prose any perceptible passion on her part.

Thus the story never attains the accessibility it needs to be emotionally involving, nor the novelty of ideas to be an unusual enough social commentary. I get what Eisen is trying to do-her choice to leave her protagonist nameless is made to endow her with the supposed burdens of countless contemporaries, and her eventual deliverance is Eisen's vote of faith in the prototype of a 'post-modern' woman she claims to address.

But the idea of a destructive search for identity isn't new. The narrator's traumas are too personal to be widely resonant. There's an unaccountable impasse between what we should feel and what we can and not enough external insight on Eisen's part to compensate. I wanted to like it, hell, I wanted to understand it, but I couldn't even begin to figure out which way to go about doing that.