BRIEFLY NOTED.

The Man of My Dreams, by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House; $22.95). Sittenfeld's second novel features a heroine, Hannah, much like the one in her widely praised debut, "Prep": an outsider who casts a critical eye on her peers. Here, though, the class cues that pervaded the boarding-school milieu of "Prep" are largely absent, as Hannah's turbulent relationships with men mark her navigation into adult life and she wittily dissects the ways in which those around her entice and discourage the opposite sex. Sittenfeld has a brisk narrative style and a rare ability to turn nearly alienating flaws into vulnerability, but her central characters, despite their acute observations of others, have no introspective faculty at all. The final chapter, written as a letter from Hannah to her former psychiatrist--and perhaps intended to temper the conventional happy ending that would place this novel squarely in the "chick lit" category--is disastrously clunky.

Digging to America, by Anne Tyler (Knopf; $24.95). Tyler is our consummate chronicler of the bewilderments of family life. In her seventeenth novel, an improbable friendship develops between two couples who meet by chance at an airport where they are picking up babies they have adopted from Korea. The Yazdans, an almost entirely assimilated Iranian-American couple, immediately change their daughter's name to Susan; the politically correct Donaldsons insist on calling their baby Jin-Ho and dressing her in Korean clothes. There are many opportunities for the sort of rueful comedy at which Tyler excels, but she also explores the permutations of estrangement available to those whose identity depends on calling elsewhere home, and delineates, with offhand grace, how subtly our own set of family customs defines us. Tyler herself married into ...