Upon first contact with Anna Quindlen's streamlined, effortlessly graceful prose, no reader will find it hard to believe her a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. "From time to time some stranger will ask me how I can bear to live in New York City," begins her latest novel, Rise and Shine, in which Bridget Fitzmaurice, an overshadowed, self-effacing social worker, watches and narrates the downfall of her famous, beautiful broadcast journalist sister. The first chapter, written in a style both lively and pithy, launches into a commentary on the various times and places in which Bridget, who works at a shelter for battered women, has heard this question.

A barrage of observations of New York follow that first chapter, in an ambivalent answer to Bridget's interlocutors that celebrates city life for its thorniness as well as for its teeming humanity. Although the novel may be on one level the story of two sisters, on another it is a crisply delineated if not arrestingly original tale about the two sister versions of New York City: the dark tragedies of battered women, their gang-banging sons and oft-impregnated daughters versus the glittering world of hypocritical wealthy charity-ball-givers whose gossip and materialism make for such easy satire. Bridget, brought close to the latter by her sister's fame, reports their foibles in a patently ironic tone laced with alternating boredom and self-congratulatory knowingness. Meghan, who hosts a morning talk show, catapults herself into disgrace by having the audacity to tell an unpopular truth on-air. The book, despite celebrating Meghan for her candor, itself seems unwilling to tell too many hard-hitting truths unless the target is the easy-to-revile, filthy rich upper-class.

There are, however, enough flippant observations of life in New York contained in this novel to fill a year's worth of columns, delivered, luckily, with just enough flair to disguise the basic cheapness of every shot. The descriptions of vacationing spots as "kiss-kiss-what-are-YOU-doing-here" places, of the children of privilege as "little brats who embrace it wholeheartedly, who order room service waiters around and complain that the spa doesn't have good shorts for sale," are all amusing and easy to indulge. Particularly unnecessary is the tendency, in the novel's palpable anxiety to capture the spirit of the city, to make complacent observations about New York that could go for a dozen other cities around the world, or even all humanity. For example, Bridget recalls a relationship "that consists of little more than sex and takeout—which is, by the way, the ruling principle of many New York relationships." As opposed to relationships in Paris or London, where True Love Waits?

Fortunately, Quindlen is masterful at characterization, and the subtle changes that happen between the two sisters alone make Rise and Shine worth reading: Bridget, whose feelings about Meghan have the intense ambivalence shared by younger sisters from time immemorial; and Meghan, whose strength comes to life early in the novel and whose weaknesses are teased out slowly and deftly before Bridget's eyes. Bridget's strengths become apparent as Meghan's weaknesses necessitate them, and the part of the novel dealing with the interplay and interdependence of their identities is infinitely more complex and nuanced than Quindlen's too frequent digressions into social realism.

Apart from the slow evolution that Meghan catalyzes in her family, the novel has little in the way of plot, which consists of a few unsurprising developments that happen offstage and are then recycled as fodder for talking heads. This paves the way for Quindlen's strengths as a writer to manifest themselves: she handles dialogue, especially at the higher planes of emotion, with a dexterity that animates the constant conversing. A wry humor always surfaces in conversations to leaven the very real pathos: when a frantic Bridget asks a relative whether she witnessed Meghan's on-air fireworks, the latter replies, "I did. And then I had bridge club. Can you imagine?" Another of Quindlen's strengths is the expansiveness of her worldview, and she goes beyond the sisters' rivalry to give us a portrait of a family with a rich sense of history and love. As Bridget's backstory unfolds, the spoken reminiscences she shares with Meghan and their caring aunt Maureen overlap with and contradict each other, reflecting the manifold facets that history always shows to different eyes. Meghan, for example, remembers the coldness of their childhood home in an amount of detail that the younger Bridget never absorbed. Once, the former describes their mother's bedside table, saying, "There were magazines and paperbacks and aspirin and a silver insulated pitcher of tea and a carafe of water and some prescription vials." While Meghan buries herself in remembering the trappings of her mother's withdrawal, Bridget simply remembers "the smell, of warm skin, Chanel No. 5, and peppermints." Disparities of perspective like these give weight and meaning to the smallest details about the Fitzmaurice family.

And in the present timeframe, Quindlen portrays with similar sympathy and discernment the sisters' social network. Bridget and Meghan's relationships with the men in their lives—Bridget's plainspoken older boyfriend Irving, Meghan's retiring, conflicted husband Evan, and their charming son Leo—widen the world of the novel to a compelling, interconnected microcosm of humanity, whose network of relationships is as tortuous and ever-changing as that nebulous New York society which the novel is so anxious to describe.

All of these major characters share an honest, fresh vitality—at least the white ones, who fall over themselves every time they speak to anyone who is black or Latino. Their attempts to prove that they are beyond political correctness and are truly able to treat everyone like a fellow human being are equally unsuccessful and un-ironic—however, these same characters also turn around and un-self-consciously criticize others who do the same, the one human foible the novel does an excellent job of portraying without glibly lampooning. Of course, in contrast to these well-developed, self-conscious middle- and upper-class characters, there are characters like Tequila, a receptionist, who "thinks everything is about sex or money," and who is too busy being the Sassy Black Woman requisite to most modern casts of characters to display much complexity.

In fact, most of the book is an easy read; it goes down smoothly, like the "Rise and shine!" slogan spoken so sunnily by Meghan each day on the morning news. Bridget and Meghan face some truths about themselves and go on to the rest of their lives a little wiser, a little bit scarred. Unlike Meghan, this novel is not out to reveal harsh or shocking truths about its essentially good-hearted characters. Instead, it stays in calmer and quieter territory, giving insights into the gnarls and tangles of family relationships without demanding too high an emotional price for the view.

Kristen Tracey never has to ask why people love New York.