ANY BITTER THING, by Monica Wood; Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 2005; 347 pages, hardback, $23.95.

To start with, Lizzy goes out jogging near her home in southern Maine at night, in the rain, in dark clothes. A car hits her and drives off. Another car comes along and stops. A man gets out, pulls her safely off the centerline, calls 911, then drives away. Lizzy is carted off to the hospital. She says she’s near death, though almost no actual pain is mentioned. In between operations to repair ruptured body parts, she thinks she sees her long-lost guardian, Father Mike, enter the room.

After these opening scenes, “Any Bitter Thing” goes on to explore the relationship of Lizzy’s childhood to her present. Long ago when her parents died, Father Mike took her in and later was falsely accused of molesting her. Lizzy recalls, in minute detail, conversations and events that occurred when she was 3.

Most of the book involves different rehearsals of the fact that Father Mike never abused Lizzy. There’s not much doubt about this, though we’re less sure of her belief that he’s still alive. Lizzy’s life also is inconvenienced by her faltering marriage and difficulties at her job as a guidance counselor, where she speaks to teenagers like a 1930s schoolmarm. And she really resents not the girl who ran her down, but the anonymous guy who rescued her and then disappeared.

Some readers, especially those associated with the creative writing industry, will find here all they look for in a book. It offers every scene in painstaking detail. Its sentences are straightforwardly composed. It tries to attend to its own rhetorical assumptions. The unhappy young woman who may have been molested will seem to some readers the most poignant of subjects; add a timely issue – the molestation was by a priest – and a twist – he didn’t do it!, and this book is so craft-conscious it has to be good.

The trouble is, it’s not. It’s leaden-slow, stretching the material for a possible short story to well over 300 pages. Its sentences are mostly construction projects that few human beings would actually utter. It is dotted with undeveloped stabs at profundity. “The human craving is for story, not truth,” we learn early on, which is philosophical twaddle and remains so even in the couple of other instances where it occurs to the author to revive the notion. And the plot is more predictable than can quite be believed.

In fact, it can’t be believed because, as the narrator implies, the truth here is of little importance. It’s a fantasy masquerading as realism.

Other books by Monica Wood of Portland include “Ernie’s Ark,” “My Only Story” and “Secret Language.”