With this novel, as with her somewhat similar 1995 novel, "Ladder of Years," Tyler chooses a disenchanted middle-aged woman as her protagonist. Rebecca Davitch -- a 50-ish widow who presides over the slightly decrepit Baltimore row house and for-rent party venue she inherited when her husband died in a car accident 30 years ago -- wonders if she hasn't lost touch with her "true self." She has raised three stepdaughters and one girl of her own, and has been an unfailing cheerleader for familial conviviality despite the bickering and grumpiness of her recalcitrant clan. She lives with and cares for her husband's uncle, a dotty fellow on the threshold of his 100th birthday. And she has thrown countless parties, flicking from guest to guest, replenishing glasses, making introductions, squelching quarrels, proposing toasts, passing trays, nudging everybody to be a little bit cheerier, a little more festive.

Rebecca's home and business is called "The Open Arms," and it's a quintessentially Tylerian operation -- shabby despite its efforts to present a grand façade, somewhat haphazardly run and fundamentally affectionate and well-meaning. A resolute anti-romantic, Tyler is the champion of such establishments and, of course, the people who resemble them. Rebecca (her family calls her "Beck") is the kind of pleasingly plump, unprepossessing woman who returns from having dinner with the jilted college boyfriend she hasn't seen in decades, looks in her rearview mirror and decides that "her two fans of hair made her look like a Texas longhorn."

The impetus for this meeting is Rebecca's burgeoning sense that her life has "got onto a whole different path," a different path, that is, from the one she followed before she stepped into a ready-made role by marrying a divorcé 13 years her senior with three young children and a large, unruly extended family. She remembers her collegiate self as sedate and orderly, with an interest in historical research. "I never read anymore," she complains to her brother-in-law, "or discuss important issues, or go to cultural events." She begins to regard the life she abandoned as "her true real life ... As opposed to her fake real life, with its tumult of drop-in relatives and party guests and repairmen."

So she takes up with her ex-boyfriend, buys a couple of Robert E. Lee biographies (she'd impressed her history professor with a paper about the Southern general) and halfheartedly tries to convince her family that there's more to her than the "unrelenting jollity" they complain about. Anyone familiar with Tyler's novels knows how all this will end, of course, but those in whom hope of being surprised still springs eternal might want to stop reading here -- it's not possible to evaluate this novel without addressing its ending.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"