Blondie, the big, blond wife of Carnegie Wong, is fatally liberal. The heroine of the “Love Wife” (Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $24.95), Gish Jen’s third novel, Blondie has founded her adult identity on her interracial marriage to Carnegie Wong and the couple’s subsequent adoption of Asian daughters. But her multiculturalism backfires, and her own daughters grow sick of her good intentions.

“If you were my real mother, you would understand! If you were my real mother, you wouldn’t be this brick wall! If you were my real mother, you’d be like Lanlan.” Lan is the Chinese nanny who, by force of her mother-in-law’s will, Blondie must accept into her family. She soon feels the Chinese members of her family are closing ranks against her.

Gish Jen is a much bolder writer than Amy Tan, whose best novels look back to China rather than forward to the multicultural mess that immigrants eventually face. Indeed, Ms. Jen complicates the interracial strife in her third novel with other bugbears of the 1990s: The Internet bubble and the paranoid self-righteousness of her teenage daughters considerably hasten Blondie’s unraveling. The love wife of the title turns out to be not Blondie but Lan.

I threw this novel across the room, not because it is poorly written but because it is excruciating. Ms. Jen has devised a narrative format in which the characters take turns, every few paragraphs, describing their lives, sometimes from a reflective point of view and sometimes in the moment, as dialogue in a play. This slows the novel down, and, because it successfully adumbrates the interior lives of at least five characters, crowds the reader’s mind with the voices of a tragic sitcom.

That each voice is convincingly stuck in its own very wrong point of view is a testament to Ms. Jen’s ruthless skill as a novelist of manners. Political correctness is now a part of the realist’s landscape, and Ms. Jen seems worried about this. “In this family we don’t” is Blondie’s trademark tic as she forbids her children to talk of sending others “back to China.” Her thoughtfulness is shallow, and it precludes the rational and emotional thoughts Ms. Jen, with obvious relish, puts in the mouth of Blondie’s mother-in-law, Mama Wong, who never approves of the family Blondie makes.

“A child should grow up, say this is my mother, period,” she says in unashamedly broken English. “This is my father, period. Otherwise the family look like not real.” According to Ms. Jen’s provocative plot, this flamboyantly incorrect apothegm seems to be true.

***

Muriel Spark’s taste for murderousness has always complimented her taste for pedagogues. Rowland, the hero of her new novella “The Finishing School” (Doubleday, 192 pages, $16.95), is no Jean Brodie. He is in fact a weakling, a would-be novelist who relies on his wife Nina to run the eponymous finishing school while Rowland obsesses on their bright student, Chris, who is on the verge of completing his own brilliant novel and showing Rowland to be the pathetic procrastinator he is.

Nina is the sort of character that animates much of Ms. Spark’s best work. Her PR efforts for the school embody Spark’s own selling point: “She tended to crush any demands for full explanations on the part of the parents. This attitude, strangely enough, generally made them feel they were getting good money’s worth.”

Likewise Spark does not spoil the big questions of life by dwelling on them. Two volumes recently issued by New Directions remind us she is a master of a light seriousness. “All the Poems of Muriel Spark”(144 pages,$13.95) treats a quotidian poem like “That Bad Cold” with grave anthropomorphism. “The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark” (128 pages, $12.95) represent the murderous impulse as a kind of quirky futility.

“The Finishing School” tends toward just that kind of deadly ending. Rowland’s obsession with his gifted student begins as a satire of creative writing teachers: “What is the story? How does it develop? Historical novels – they have to develop. How?” But as Ms. Spark’s story develops, Rowland tips into insanity, and the novel loses vitality. “The Finishing School” is not a landmark in Ms. Spark’s oeuvre, but it is a fine addition.

***

Last week the Op-Ed section of the New York Times took the unusual step of publishing a short story, by Jonathan Safran Foer. “The Sixth Borough” envisions an island that once floated offshore of Manhattan: “Bagels were strung from island to island on special spaghetti, samosas were bowled at baguettes, Greek salads were thrown like confetti. “Meanwhile, Toure, whose single-word pen name appears regularly in Rolling Stone, has published “Soul City” (Little Brown, 192 pages, $19.95), an allegory that uses the same methods to exaggerate racial characteristics: “When Europeans arrived they chained down the flying people and carted them to America, only to find that the moment the chains came off, they escaped into the air.”

Put in mind of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fabled village, we wonder if we love Macondo now less than ever. Magical realism has long been embattled, but it’s worth noting – and asking why – it is becoming a workaday mode for political allegory.