In her third novel, her first in 20 years, feminist Alix Kates Shulman depicts an unlikely threesome inhabiting a stunning, ecologically correct mansion in the hills of Wildbloom, N.J., 70 minutes from Lincoln Center, as Heather McKay, the female in the trio, likes to say. Formerly an assistant editor at an architectural journal based in the City, she now stays home with the kids and writes an online ecology column, pining to author the "stirring" stories she knows are within her. Mack, her ambitious husband, 2 inches shorter than she, drives his Porsche each day to his Manhattan office or to the airport to fly to L.A. to cement one of his commercial property deals. Their marriage is one of luxurious boredom.

Enter Zoltan Barbu, a charismatic exiled émigré whose novel, "Fire Watch," years ago had brought him renown, an essay in the New York Review of Books by Susan Sontag and residencies at literary retreats. Now 50, he's doing hack work in Hollywood, wondering if he can overcome his writer's block to complete a second novel. As the novel begins, he's dressing for his ex-mistress' funeral. He's broken off the relationship with Maja Stern, a sultry director's assistant -- she's too demanding a distraction -- and he thinks she's committed suicide for spite, leaving him, in the eyes of the second-tier Hollywood circle in which they move, at least partially culpable.

Through his college roommate, Mack is acquainted with Maja, has dined with her (and lusted after her) on business trips to the West Coast. At her funeral he meets Zoltan, "all bone and beak," looking "like a large predatory bird." After the funeral, Mack invites Zoltan to dinner, and following the sumptuous meal during which Mack reveals his insecurities, Zoltan spies an opportunity. By evening's end, they've made a deal: Zoltan will move in with the McKays in New Jersey and finish his novel in splendid isolation, and in return, he'll teach them "the art of living." Back at home when Mack proposes the arrangement, Heather is titillated, both by her husband's "gutsy risk" that promises to aerate their lackluster marriage, and by the prospect of being "the apex of this beguiling triangle."

It's an odd ménage a trois, "Mack the impresario directing Zoltan the guru playing to Heather's acolyte." And Shulman plays it for all it's worth, skewering the egos of all three principals, showing how thin the veneer of manners, morals, even common courtesy can be. In this wise and witty novel, Shulman displays once again her astute understanding of the loaded relationships between males and females that earned her fame with her first novel, "The Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen."

Kathryn Lang, former senior editor at SMU Press in Dallas, is a freelance editor and reviewer.