Anne Louvet is a passive, pretty waitress whose horrible childhood secret makes her wary of strangers. Charles Hartmann is a WWI veteran who's estranged from his barren wife and his own nebulous needs. Together, they find love, or at least a few mindless quickies, in a rain-swept seaside town in 1930s France. Sebastian Faulks' other historical novels include the best-selling Birdsong, which won him the 1995 British Book Awards' Author Of The Year prize, and Charlotte Gray, which netted the Literary Review's annual "Bad Sex" prize in 1998. This pallid, lightweight romance predates both award winners by several years, but is only now being published in the U.S., possibly because it doesn't have enough presence to incite either praise or mockery. Like Faulks' other books, Girl fixates on the world wars' debilitating effect on the emotional state of Europe. Here, he rams home his points about alienation by writing in a deliberately distanced, frustratingly passive voice while turning all his characters into shell-shocked drones. Hartmann sees emotions as externalized events that inexplicably happen to him, while Louvet is a remote, self-absorbed creature of instinct who acts without reason or conscious thought. Their bloodless, soporific passions mean the world to them, even if they have no idea why. Faulks writes poetically, and is clearly earnest and deliberate in his efforts to restrain both his characters and his readers from any untoward contact with real emotion. Still, "misguided" seems the kindest description for an author who focuses so intently on characters who can't think or feel, yet spend 245 pages vaguely pretending to do both.