OUR TINY, USELESS HEARTS

Text, $29.99

Let's take a pen and draw, not a bizarre love triangle but a confused love heptagon. Toni Jordan's latest novel is a beautifully crafted piece of work where lines of communication and fidelity are bent out of shape and reconfigured in different forms.

Caroline is married to Henry, although Henry is having a fling with his daughter's primary school teacher, Martha, who is (of course) younger and hotter than Caroline. Meanwhile, the next door neighbours, the impossibly shiny, permatanned Lesley and Craig, are having their own marital spats and in the middle of the storm is Caroline's sister, Janice, who is inadvertently sprung in the nude with the leery, blond ponytailed Craig by her former husband Alec (whom she still lusts after).

Our Tiny, Useless Hearts is an enjoyable romp full of bed-swapping antics, lies and subterfuge. The narrative begins and ends with shattered glass and all the mayhem takes place in one hectic weekend in a leafy outer suburb of Melbourne, otherwise known as the "Friendly Neighbourhood Crotch Program".

The book is full of wit and sparkle (along with decrotched pants and bisected ties). After the historical drama of her previous book, Nine Days, Jordan is back in the giddy throes of romantic comedy, a genre that she adores and manipulates so well in her first two books, Addition and Fall Girl.

"I think screwball bedroom farce is my natural default," she says. "I have trouble taking much of the world seriously, actually. I see the absurd everywhere and whenever I see someone being cool and serious, I always think we're all like children walking around in our parents' clothes, pretending to be grown up."

Raised in a Brisbane family of "serious, working-class people", with divorced parents, her early priority was to be able to pay her mortgage. Both a passionate reader and a science nerd, she trained as a physiologist and worked as a molecular biologist and quality control chemist (as well as a door-to-door aluminium-siding saleswoman).

In 1994 she quit her job as marketing manager for a vitamin company in Melbourne to try copywriting as a career, signed up for a professional writing course at RMIT – and chose "novel" as one of her options. It turned out she was a natural.

As in her other books, Our Tiny, Useless Hearts incorporates some of her scientific background in Janice's job as a microbiologist. Sprinkled throughout are metaphorical asides that speak of an infectious disease with the potential to disarm even the most ardent cynic: "Everything about love is bacterial … Love colonises your whole body."

When asked if she has any suggestions for keeping (monogamous) romance alive, Jordan retorts, "Gah! I'm absolutely not weighing into that. It's far too much like tempting fate". She has, however, been with her partner Robbie for 22 years and is a self-confessed "card-carrying member of Hopeless Romantics Inc". She adds: "I do think we could do better jobs of loving each other. We talk about it all the time, 'love', as if the feeling is actually a noun. The important thing is not 'love' but 'loving'. It's a verb. It's what you do, that's what matters. So many people mistake drama for love."

With its ensemble cast, one-house setting and snappy, droll lines, Our Tiny, Useless Hearts is the most filmic of all Jordan's novels. She says dialogue is her favourite thing to write, other than sex scenes. "When you step back and look at sex objectively, it's utterly ridiculous: all that wriggling and panting and funny faces."

Alec (who wants to reunite with Janice) is berated for having no "respect for the sanctity of divorce". And in an extended fruit-inspired analogy, Henry tries to rationalise his womanising ways to his young daughters. "Even if mangoes were your favourite food, you'd be pretty sick of mangoes after fifteen years, wouldn't you? ... You're surrounded by other fruit all right, everywhere you go. Strawberries brushing against you, mandarins slinking around the office in their tight little skirts."

In between the hilarious coupling shenanigans the novel is a clever suburban satire and a sly nod to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. It also incorporates poignant moments that provoke a lump to the throat rather than a belly chuckle, like the charting of the enduring regret of divorce and the trials of infertility.

Jordan argues that these tonal narrative shifts are essential for comedy. "There's something about the contrast of humour with sadness. Humour works best when you move readers through a range of emotions; that way, the contrasts make everything sharper."