PORTUGUESE field worker João leaves his house early one morning to find his liftetime friend and one-time lover, Rui, hanging dead from a tree in his front yard. So begins Alentejo Blue, the second novel from Monica Ali, the critically praised and award-winning Anglo-Bangladeshi writer.

With a few skilled strokes, Ali spans the lengthy lives of these two men: grounded, earthy João and fiery but disillusioned Rui. At the emotionally charged ending of this chapter, as João holds Rui’s cord-thin body in his arms, he thinks, “eighty-four years is barely a beginning.”

The story of João and of Rui’s apparent suicide is easily the most affecting chapter in the narrative. And so I say this very reluctantly: Such a powerful start ultimately hurts the book because it’s quite a hard act to follow. The rest of the novel intrigues but doesn’t compel, and little of what follows is as gutting or gripping.

Back in 2003, Ali’s debut novel Brick Lane won her praise in Granta magazine, which called her one of the twenty best young British novelists today. So it’s surprising how difficult it is to read her sophomore effort. Perhaps it would be nicer if it were more immediately obvious that each chapter can (and probably should) be taken as a short story in its own right. They hang together only very loosely, each one told from the viewpoint of a new character. The players interact; natives, tourists and expats pass through one another’s stories and lives, but never quite touch.

The Alentejo is a rural area in Portugal, “poorest region in the poorest country in the European Union,” at least before the countries of Eastern Europe joined, according to one wry native in Ali’s tale. But times are changing. What will remain constant and what will be irrevocably altered in the Alentejo village of Mamarrosa is the source of the novel’s background tension. It’s a dichotomy summed up in the presence of an Internet café that lacks any Internet connections (or even any working computers), an apt metaphor for the precarious line the village walks, balanced awkwardly between the old and new.

In this condition, the community anticipates the arrival of their golden boy, Marco Afonso Rodrigues, soon to return from the outside world like a poor man’s Messiah. Will he come and build a hotel in the village (ousting the workers’ collectives that were the stuff of Rui’s Marxist aspirations, but potentially bringing prosperity and progress)? Will he show up at all?

There is much “blue” in the Alentejo—the melancholy lies thick upon each and every character—but there isn’t much in the way of foreground tension or plot. There is very little story to this story.

Particularly unfortunate is the character of Stanton, whose tale suffers doubly from its number-two placement. After being so fully immersed in elderly, pensive João, making the switch to Stanton’s lethargic point of view is downright annoying. It might be tempting to simply put the book down altogether if one isn’t aware that other, more rewarding characters are to follow.

Stanton is an ultimately aimless, expat Englishman. His writer’s block is just one symptom of his lack of self-propulsion: He’s supposed to be completing a book, but instead, he sort of falls into an affair with Chrissie, a married, fellow English expat whom he describes as a “dishrag,” whose arms are flea-bitten bloody and whose kisses taste of “[b]randy and a sharp tang of vomit.” Soon after, he sleeps with her 16-year-old daughter, Ruby, a homely, deaf, unhappy girl with “anemic skin” and a “fuck-you walk,” who is rumored to be so promiscuous the local prostitutes pick fights with her for ruining their trade by “giving it away for free.”

But nothing comes of any of this. Aside and unnoticed, Ruby’s little brother Jay contemplates an act of arson, but never does it. Even the angry prostitutes don’t materialize. And Stanton’s betrayal of two women (and one husband) results in nothing. In the end, Stanton is literally just standing there, “[waiting] for something to happen, and nothing happened at all.” Unintentionally accurate?

Equally difficult is the character of Vasco, the portly bartender, who goes on for several pages agonizing over whether or not to eat a slice of cake.

More enjoyable, though just as unresolved, is the tale of British tourist Eileen and her unnamed husband, growing apart as they grow older: “When did he start doing that? Using my name only when he wants to make me feel stupid.” The steps Eileen takes from self-blame to self-worth are small, but they resonate.

Then there’s Teresa, a girl of not-quite-twenty who secretly plans to go abroad for the first time, as an au pair. As she wavers between naive, dreamy excitement, guilty panic, and regret for those she leaves behind—her mother, who will not approve, her boyfriend, whom she has not yet slept with—one develops a real affection for her. Her emotions are completely familiar to anyone who has ever looked forward to something new and huge and life-altering.

But Teresa, Eileen and João are in the minority here.

Monica Ali has an undeniable gift with descriptive language. She’s able to paint a vivid, unexpected, yet completely appropriate image with just a few words. A friend’s ear is “as cool and soft as a puffball; if he pressed down hard, it would explode in a gentle cloud.” Tomatoes “turn a bright, deceiving red” and “[will] not taste of anything.” A passerby, prim and composed, strikes a self-dissatisfied woman as someone who “would never leave her cereal bowl in the sink all day.” Young Teresa, frightened and excited by what awaits her, tightens her ponytail and errant hair is trapped in her clip; it “caught and pulled and brightened her eyes,” even as her memories of home pull at her, stretched cobweb-thin.