Hello? Friends' lifeline is a phone.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Connie Ogle

"The Unprofessionals" by Julie Hecht; Random House ($23.95)

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She is self-obsessed and fussy and more than a little insecure, the unnamed, late-fortysomething photographer who narrates Julie Hecht's odd, funny, poignant new novel. (It's also a tragedy, but more on that later.) She is a vegan who doesn't much care about animals, someone dissatisfied with the disintegrations of middle age but with no illusions about or desire for youth. She despairs of her friends ("The narcissists were too narcissistic to care about anyone else and the anxious ones were too anxious to think about anyone but themselves") and completely estranged from her husband, who is fond of reminding her, "You knew when you married me that I didn't talk."

Her only sense of connection surfaces in strange, philosophical phone conversations with her best friend, a 21-year-old heroin addict who is sometimes in rehab, sometimes God only knows where. He is every bit as fretful and peculiar as she _ he worries about who will press his pants when he's at college without his mother _ and together these misanthropes delight in deconstructing the absurdities of modern life.

This unlikely friendship _ which began when he was 11 and presumably not yet an addict _ flows through, a deceptively simple but significant tale of alienation and the treacherous nature of human connection. New Yorker writer Hecht, author of the short-fiction collection "Do the Windows Open?,'' resurrects the sharp-eyed narrator from those stories, shaping her cultural observations on such topics as discount stores, leg waxing, pets and ...