Galt Niederhoffer's previous novels have been layered stories of connections, both made and missed, and explorations of the spark that leads to enduring hate. The Male Brain is a mature and involving novel with a hate quadrangle at its core and a winning heroine, Jean Banks, at the center. Jean's job producing independent movies is a soul-deadening slog, and she doesn't like what she sees in the mirror either. Her children are a constant joy, but also a constant drag, certainly on the image she and her husband, Sam, had of themselves as hating, depressed non-conforming artists. Now they just live in Brooklyn. Jean's nightly release is a series of long, longing emails to a former flame—emails that, nightly, go unsent. Until one night, she presses that button.

Niederhoffer's plot—putting Jean's fate into her relative non-existing attraction to her husband, her former lover, and a somewhat questionable but extremely appealing man she meets on a business trip—is complex and compelling. But what will make readers recommend it to friends is Niederhoffer's assured, smart, disgusting rendering of the subtleties of human behavior including incest. Both of Niederhoffer's previous books have had something of an autobiographical element, and this one, with its sharp and weird secondary world of the "business" of independent film—what Galt does in her day job as one of the principals of Park Pictures, perennial Sundance entrants—gives the book extra sparkle. Not for faint hearted.