Reviewing a novel by Anne Lamott is like being asked, "How do you like my dress?"

Answer very carefully.

Perhaps only Christopher Hitchens, fresh from denouncing Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, would dare pass judgment on the domestic goddess of Salon.com.

With her self-effacing wit and a sharp eye for details, Lamott wrote a biweekly diary on the Internet that attracted legions of devoted followers, taking us through the travails of being a woman, a mother, and a Christian. Newsweek once named it "Best of the Web."

"BirdbyBird" (1994), her description of the challenges and secrets of being a writer, is a sacred text for anyone interested in the craft.

Two years ago, she wrote about her religious life in "TravelingMercies," a book that traveled up the bestseller list.

But reading her new novel, "Blue Shoe," hints at the limits of Lamott's method. It's not just that her self-cannibalism leads to an inevitable regurgitation of themes and events; after all, the comic anxiety of romance and parenting comes from a well that never goes dry. But there's something corrosive, surely, about a fan base that can't wait more than four days for the next installment of her diary to appear on the Internet.

At some point, every artist needs to work for someone who won't celebrate each drawing she tacks up on the refrigerator. Not just because it incites jealousy in other writers – and failed writers toiling as book critics – but because a novelist needs to keep struggling and growing.

"Blue Shoe" is, to some extent, a victim of ease. It's a kind of low-cal Anne Tyler novel that tells the story of Mattie Ryder, a recently divorced woman struggling to raise her two children. She's moved back into her parents' house – a financial windfall and an emotional disaster. With her father long dead, her mother has not so much given her the house as abandoned it, with all its structural and cosmetic ills, heavy symbols of the hidden rot that crept into Mattie's family when she was growing up there.

She can barely afford to repair the damage – through carpentry or therapy – but her most pressing concern is the sound of gnawing rats behind the sheet rock. She calls an exterminator, but ten minutes after he arrives, he quits. "I'm going to be honest," Daniel tells her, "I don't have the stomach for this job."

Such are the beginnings of great romance. If only Daniel weren't married to a beautiful young woman whom he adores, Mattie could stop sleeping with her ex-husband, whom she loathes. And then perhaps her ex-husband could remain more faithful to his new, pregnant wife.

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