This late-in-the-book awakening by a grumpy anti-social woman is something of a formula for Smiley. Strip Lidie Newton of its grand historical trappings, and it bears eerie resemblance to an early Smiley novel, an ingenious little mystery called Duplicate Keys. That book stars a diffident young heroine named Alice, who had arrived in Manhattan from the Midwest a few years earlier, passively tagging along with friends from college who were trying to make it as a rock group. Now she's pushing 30, working at a library, and drifting.

On the surface, Duplicate Keys is a conventional mystery--it begins when two of Alice's rock-band friends turn up dead in her apartment. But it comments brilliantly on the out-of-whack souls that draw so many ambitious young people to Manhattan.

In her naive, homely, out-of-it quality, Alice is Lidie Newton's forebear. As the mystery unravels, she finds out that everything she assumed about herself and the people around her was wrong. But in Duplicate Keys these discoveries are much more haunting due to the suspenseful plot.

In the new book the setup takes too long, and Lidie's sudden leaps in self-understanding feel too labored to believe.