Emily Miller just ditched her boyfriend, Declan Patrick O’Donnell, a dot-com entrepreneur who posted a pornographic picture of her on the Internet in order to bail himself out of serious financial trouble. The snapshot of her bare bottom is getting four million hits a week, an impressive figure due almost entirely to Emily’s, well, impressive figure. (Emily’s best friend Cara remarks that she has “boobs the size of nuclear warheads.”)

When Emily’s cried all she can cry and her tissue disintegrates, having reached its “Critical Snot Limit,” she turns to Cara for refuge while her life falls apart just like that saturated Kleenex. Cara is a meditating, vegetarian, flaky New Age type, and everything in her cabinets, right down to the toilet cleaner, is organic. Emily’s problems get even worse when photos of herself are plastered on the front page of every English newspaper, she loses her job as an English teacher in an exclusive private school, and she discovers that Declan has managed to bleed her dry. In short, she’s broke, jobless, and notorious.

Emily decides to hire a publicist in order to make some quick money off her notoriety, realizing that without a publicist she’s just “a little inconsequential splash of paint on a big, blowsy Jackson Pollock canvas.” While waiting to meet her publicist at a fancy party, however, she spots an amazing hunk and senses a connection to him. The hunk (whom she doesn’t really talk to that evening due to an unfortunate spot of pesto sauce on her nose and the resulting horrific humiliation) happens to be Adam, chief photographer for the Hampstead Observer, the newspaper that first broke the sordid tale of Emily’s Internet disgrace. It turns out that Cara, who also works at the paper, has a bit of a crush on Adam, and – indecisive flake that she is – she also has a bit of a crush on Emily’s ex-boyfriend, Declan.

At the beginning of this book, Declan is undeniably scum. He is also none too bright, as he rather stupidly prints out the website with Emily’s nude photo and leaves the printout where she could easily find it. He has a talent for scamming people, as evidenced by the fact that he’s convinced investors to back three somewhat goofy website ideas, but he’s also a bit weak on the execution phase, and rapidly going under financially. Declan feels bad about “selling out the only person who cared about him,” but he doesn’t feel bad enough to take her photo off the site right away. Eventually Declan starts up an “arty” porn site, www.cheekylittlebits.com, and begins reevaluating his life.

Meanwhile, Adam reevaluates his life – he’s “on the far side of thirty, permanently penniless, and an embittered divorcé,” Adam’s son Josh lives with his ex-wife. Because he wants to see his “nearly teenage ankle-biter” son more often, Adam thinks about taking a different job and, even though he’s pretty much given up on his social life in deference to Josh, he begins to think twice about that policy when he spots a lovely woman at a party. But will he ever connect with that mysterious woman, or will he fall for the needy, flaky Cara instead?

This is a fairly complex book, with a lot more heft than you might suppose based on the cartoony cover. The relationships among the characters are complicated, and as a result the novel isn’t easy to synopsize. It’s also amusing, in a wry, ironic British way, but isn’t laugh-out-loud funny since the characters deal with some pretty heavy issues. Adam, for instance, must face the possibility of a move by his ex-wife (and therefore beloved son) to Australia while Emily’s sudden notoriety, which isn’t played quite as much for laughs as you might imagine, requires her to cope in new ways.

The characters are better rounded than you’d expect, too. Cara isn’t nearly the flake she first appears (despite an amusing scene in which she performs an ancient Wiccan ritual involving a bag of flour, candles, and cell phones), and Declan is more than the one-dimensional, selfish villain he seems at the beginning. Adam’s ex-wife isn’t a vengeful harpy, but a woman with troubles of her own and Adam himself is a loving father who’s pretty much given up dating in order to avoid a parade of women running through his son’s life.

Now for what I didn’t like about the book. The chapters (precisely one hundred of them) are short, abrupt, and a bit on the choppy side. Further, the book is awkward to read because the chapters written from Emily’s point of view are in the present tense, first person, while the chapters written from everyone else’s point of view are in the past tense, third person. This made reading the novel seem more like work than play – more like slogging than snogging, if you will. And the book is unfortunately diminished by an awful lot of coincidences, like Emily just happening to spot her best friend’s coworker across a crowded room and falling for him. And how likely is it that a single nude photo on the Internet (even of a very attractive woman) would draw so very much attention, given how many nude photos are out there nowadays?

Bare Necessity isn’t easy to characterize. It’s not, in my opinion, really Chick Lit, because it’s not funny and outrageously hip enough, and it’s certainly not romance, as the eventual resolution of the attraction between Adam and Emily is unsatisfying. I can’t say more for fear of spoilers, and since this isn’t a genre romance, an HEA isn’t required, but believe me, unsatisfying is an understatement.

The author’s writing is amusing, in that dry British way, and her characters were intriguing and well-drawn, but if Ms. Matthews had relied less on amazing twists of fate and written a more satisfying conclusion, the novel could have been a whole lot better. In the end, Bare Necessity wasn’t a necessity for this reader, but it was certainly quite… bearable.