by JULIET WATERS

Filmmaker Charlotte Anne Byers has taken the title for her first film from a Bruce Lee aphorism: "If you gaze too hard at the finger pointing to the moon, you'll miss all the heavenly glory." This is one of those lines you don't want to think about or you might ask a question like, why would anyone be gazing hard at the finger anyway? In Bruce Lee movies you don't want to be gazing too hard at the script.

A similar point can be made about Elizabeth Crane's first novel, which shares the title of its heroine's film, All This Heavenly Glory. If you start to ask hard questions about what we're really learning about Charlotte Anne, or whether the digressive style that is becoming Crane's trademark is really working, you'll find problems. But you'll also miss a lot of good stuff: Crane's sharp intelligence and wit, her flawed, usually alcoholic, un-self-consciously hip and very likeable characters.

In describing her film, Charlotte Anne, aka C.A., sums up her creator's novel pretty well: "All This Heavenly Glory, briefly, is on the surface a chick flick." The novel's about two friends. One friend is in a relationship "wishing she had the courage to not even be in a relationship," while the other is "wishing she were in a difficult relationship as opposed to no relationship."

C.A. is the friend living the no relationship life. As a native New Yorker, who's moved recently to Chicago, she has more than her fair share of anecdotes. Mostly these are bad-date stories or miscarried relationships that don't survive the first or second trimester. There's Howard, another filmmaker. Mix him equally with actor/filmmaker Matteo, and you have a fairly good recipe for Vincent Gallo. There's ageing rock star Declan, a kind of Philadelphia version of Jon Bon Jovi. And there's Todd, yet another self-described filmmaker, and another reason to leave New York.

It's pretty clear from the number of men she attracts that C.A. is reasonably hot. Something just isn't working for her. It may be she's not looking in the right places. Like one of the characters in Crane's excellent first book of short stories, When the Messenger Is Hot, C.A. goes through a stage where she uses AA as a dating service. It may be she's too happy in her fantasy life, one that is not entirely improbable. She is a talented filmmaker, so there's always the very slim possibility her crush on Owen Wilson will pan out. More likely there's a deeper problem blocking her.

Raised by a narcissistic, self-absorbed mother - an opera singer no less - with some obvious boundary issues, C.A. is the textbook over-independent loner. Crane has an interesting way of examining Charlotte, entering her life at different points in no chronological order: when she's middle-aged and crafting a personals ad, when she's eight and playing Urchin #2 in an opera, when she's a young adult, when she's a pre-teen. Sometimes she writes from the first person, sometimes third, and sometimes even second, as in a chapter framed as guidelines for being an ex-New Yorker on September 11.

The strategy is sometimes like watching a dog gnaw at a big bone, turning it over and over attacking it from different angles, and still Crane never quite gets to the marrow of her character. C.A. is very careful in her film to avoid any Hollywood moments of insight: "Ok, well maybe they got just a smidgen of insight, but the likelihood is that these people aren't going to change radically anytime soon. It was my intent to just show people as they really are." That's a fine goal for an indie film, but for a novel, we could use more than the smidgen we get.

At the same time Crane gets a lot of energy from a bitter-girl tone that's less like pointing a finger than giving the finger to the moon. And sometimes that's not such a bad attitude.

All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane, Little, Brown, hc, 231pp, $32.95