Christopher Marquis' first novel A Hole in the Heart is staged against the backgrounds of Alaska and San Francisco.

The book starts off well enough. A young woman, Bean Jessup, arrives at an elementary school in a fishing town of 2,500 people on Alaska's southern coast. She settles into a tiny trailer with a sink so small that she can barely clean pots and pans in it and with so little space between the bed and doorway that she can barely get dressed in the morning.

On her first day of work at nearby Eyak Elementary, she thinks the school building is the ugliest thing she's ever seen. Located on a slope behind river rocks, the building is made of corrugated gray metal that looks like it had been ferried over in prefab slabs and stapled together. Which it had.

The teachers keep clear of her, which she doesn't mind. And although they are all a bit overweight, she welcomes this after having lived among so may anorexic types back in San Francisco.

Marquis does a good job of drawing us into Bean's story as we watch her brace for a harsh Alaskan winter of snow and wind and view her attending a footrace - Eyak's yearly tradition to celebrate the end of the salmon run. Here she meets Mick, a fisherman and carpenter, who takes her on hikes in the woods where they view fields of wildflowers and watch bald eagles. She begins to see Alaska through Mick's eyes, and eventually the two get married.

At this point, the book takes a nosedive. Characterizations remain weak in A Hole in the Heart and certainly one of the more inane characters is Mick. The most exciting thing he can do is sneak up on his wife: When she is watching TV, he pops up behind the couch; when she is washing dishes, he comes up and sprouts two arms underneath her own. He takes pride in his sneaky maneuvers, and tells his wife, "It's hard to be so clever and stealthy and I hope you appreciate it."

Of course, some of these scenes are done for comical effect, but the author seldom generates a smile let alone a laugh. When Mick dies in a climbing accident, it's almost a relief.

After his death, Bean discovers Mick had been having an affair with her best friend, Lois. She eventually makes up with her friend, and they hit the bars day and night, trying to make some sense out of life. At this point, readers are forced to plow through long stretches of nothingness.

Bean finally takes off with Mick's mom, Hanna, and they head back down the Alaska-Canada Highway to San Francisco. Hanna adds a little humor with her bland personality, poor sense of direction, and compulsion to smoke in a San Francisco apartment where Bean has a no-smoking rule.

But it's not enough to save the book from its sluggish pace. Marquis aims to cover serious subjects in his story - widowhood, death, abuse - but he too often falls short. In the end, A Hole in the Heart leaves nothing but the void the title might predict.

Dolores Derrickson is a freelance writer living in Aurora.