The Judds are your average, everyday, upper-middle-class British family. Charles and Daphne, the parents, have retired to Cornwall so he can golf while she obsesses over flower arrangements at the local church. Son Charlie is making a fortune selling socks over the Internet. Lovely, waif-like daughter Sophie has a job in advertising and a bachelorette pad in London.

Then there's the other daughter, Juliet - adoringly known as JuJu - busy serving two years in a federal prison near Buffalo, NY, after trying to fence a stolen Tiffany window.

Thus ends the Judds' attempt at normalcy, and thus begins The Promise of Happiness, the dry, witty, but achy novel by South African writer Justin Cartwright.

The Judds are not pretentious people. They never expected more than a modest share of happiness in life. Indeed, their collective life trajectories seem to trace paths of diminished expectations.

Charles and Daphne live together in "a fine mist of resentment which neither of them can quite dispel." Charlie, who is about to marry a beautiful woman he doesn't love, is vaguely ashamed of having made so much money selling a product he never sees, dependent on the skills of two computer-geek employees whom he vaguely regards as "exotic pets."

But with JuJu's disgrace - broadcast worldwide by the press - it seems that their sense of themselves as a reasonably successful family unit has been shredded.

JuJu was almost a religion for the Judds. Bright and beautiful, an Oxford grad and art history scholar, her infatuation with lovely objects was to them "evidence of the human striving for the impossible." (Younger sister Sophie insists, "She has the look of someone made in heaven.")

Charles, who doted on his older daughter, has been the most devastated, although the entire family seems to have been frozen in grief during her two-year imprisonment.

The novel opens on the day of her release. Charlie has flown to Buffalo to collect her. Most of the book is about the slow drift toward an eventual family reunion as brother and sister wend their way home.

As they wait, each family member tries to sort through the "penumbra of moral ambiguity" into which events have cast them.

Charles's search is the most painful and complicated. He's racked with guilt over the fact that he never visited JuJu in prison. At the same time, he's still reeling from wrongs done him by the prestigious accounting firm that once employed him, even as he finds himself increasingly a misfit in an England now populated by immigrants and people who chat on the Internet (a device which is no more than "a moronic inferno, with spelling mistakes," as far as Charles is concerned).

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