Nick Clifford, Sigerson’s protagonist, is a wealthy, handsome stock trader in London who is married to Trish, a beautiful former flight attendant who now makes a career of traveling around, showing potential investors a good time on the bankroll of her Middle Eastern bosses. She is physically stunning and sexually ravenous, and Nick cannot believe his good fortune in having her as his wife. Unfortunately for Nick, Trish is, as he has feared, too good to be true, and in quick succession Trish becomes pregnant, her former lover resurfaces and Nick’s life falls apart. The rest of the novel concerns Nick’s coping with his feelings for Trish, his devotion to his infant daughter and his various dysfunctional friends and lovers.

Nick and Trish are the novel’s most thoroughly explored characters, but they remain aloof and difficult to comprehend. First of all, they’re not like you and me; aside from their astonishingly good looks and their sexual insatiability, they are fabulously wealthy. Nick spends most of the book jetting back and forth between London and New York, and Trish takes posh ski vacations in the Alps. This is all fine, as far as it goes, but we are never given much more on which to base our impressions of the characters. We do not know, for example, why we are to believe that Trish is the ideal catch, beyond the facts that she’s achingly gorgeous and willing to have sex with almost anyone at almost any time in almost any manner (actually, we are, I think, supposed to believe that she will have sex at any time, in any manner, and that her only possible point of discretion is in her choice of partners). We are also expected to accept Nick as the quintessential decent guy, although there’s not much to recommend him besides his love for his daughter. Otherwise, he’s shallow, manipulative and self-absorbed.

Instead of giving us engaging characters and situations, Sigerson gives us niggling and irrelevant details. We are overloaded with menus of finicky gourmet meals, lists of expensive wines and trendy cocktails, title-dropping of hip popular music and far too much emphasis on fashion and flash. Like Ellis’ psychopathic antihero who meticulously catalogs the designer clothing worn by everyone he meets, Sigerson wants to impress us with the anointed lives of his characters. The distinction between the two books is that Ellis uses superficiality (as juxtaposed with brutal violence) as a metaphor for the crumbling moral foundation of our culture, while Sigerson seems to imbue his excessive description with no subtext whatsoever. (It is perhaps relevant to note that Sigerson is a former record company executive who grew up in New York and London, and, therefore, the characters who are not like you and me may be, in fact, like him.)

The hook of the novel is supposed to be its frank and uninhibited depiction of sex, but the sex scenes are so ridiculously graphic that they quickly lose any erotic punch that they might have had. The descriptive language is the stuff of adult bookstore pornographic fiction, and it is apparent early on that the paper-thin plot exists solely, as it does in pornographic films, to string together one sexual encounter after another. I found myself, by the end of the book, skimming over the sex scenes in much the same way that I glossed over many of the more violent scenes in American Psycho - not because I was offended, but because I got the point, and I was bored.

If Sigerson does indeed have a point in Faithful, it is not an appealing one. The jacket copy claims that the book is written with “an unfiltered awareness of the ways in which today’s women experience their sexual prowess”; if Trish is meant to be the stereotype of a sexually empowered (if well-meaning) woman, we are apparently intended to believe that sexual liberation (and, perhaps, working outside the home) leads to the destruction of families and catastrophic emotional cruelty. Indeed, the central thesis of the novel is laid out when one of Nick’s coworkers explains (in terms that I can’t use in this publication) that a sexually submissive woman is ideal, while a sexually aggressive woman is dangerous. The former is obviously devoted to her man, while the latter will sleep with her man’s friends.

Alas, Trish is not the sole offensive characterization in Sigerson’s novel. Nick’s friend, Koestler is a loathsome, self-hating Jew who is the most gleeful presentation of a negative stereotype this side of Shylock, and Trish’s old flame, Johnny, is a pathetic masochist who exists only to be battered around by the book’s other characters. Even worse, Johnny’s brother pops up in one scene, then disappears forever, presumably so that a predatory, self-hating homosexual can be added to the roster of despicable deviants.