Category: fiction

I can’t believe this is this author’s debut! First off, she came up with an amazing concept, being basically: tradwife goes back in time.  Then, even more gallingly, she really hit the execution of the concept out of the ballpark.  I won’t give away too much, because it has a fun twist, so let me just quote extensively as I like to do with books I like:

On her brother-in-law: “A pimple-faced corn dog of a young man with a bad temper”

On her husband, a rather sad figure who she forces into what she thinks his gender role should be: “he still wore his masculinity so roughly and unnaturally, as if it were an ill-fitting sweater I’d forced over his head”

And then best of all:

“Natalie’s like a border collie,” my mother used to say to the other women at church.  “She needs a project, otherwise she starts chewing the cabinet corners.”

“Are you saying my son is a project?” I imagined (my father-in-law) saying.

“No,” I imagined my mother replying.  “I’m saying he’s the cabinet corner.”

I loved McCurdy’s memoir I’M GLAD MY MOM’S DEAD, so I thought I would give her fiction a whirl.  It wasn’t for me as good as her memoir, but I still enjoyed it.  She’s a sharp writer of uncomfortable topics.

In this novel, a seventeen year old girl pursues her English teacher.  He does not put up much of a fight.  They have lots of very explicit sex.  You will not be amazed to learn she does not have a very stable home life.  She gets very fixated on him, and eventually demands he leaves his wife.  I was surprised to feel rather sorry for him.  Here he is on how teaching is not his dream:

I wanted to be a writer.  A novelist.  But I couldn’t handle the lack of security required to be one.  I couldn’t tolerate the fluctuating, inconsequential strings of income.  The consistent rejection.  The scrutiny of my parent’s friends . . The uncertainty.  I chose being able to afford take-out from the Thai place on the corner over roughing it, living off ramen noodles. I chose going to the game with the guys over submitting my short stories to publicatins.  I chose catching up on my favourite TV show over finishing a draft.  I chose comfort over betting on myself.’

He leaves his wife for her, and once she has him she does not want him any more. 

It is never a good idea to like a book so much that you immediately buy another one by the same author. It never works out. I know this, but oh well.  This author wrote THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR, which I very much liked, and being desperate and on vacation I decided to read her other book, her first, STAY UP WITH HUGO BEST. 

I am utterly, utterly confused by the morality of this book.  It tells about a 30 year old aspiring comedian who is trapped doing a menial receptionist job at the late night talk show of an older comedian she very much admires.  The show gets cancelled, and he invites her to spend the weekend at his home.  Creepily, she agrees; but she seems weirdly checked out from the whole experience. Like, if you are going to sleep your way to the top, at least being enthusiastically trying to get to the top.  Or agonise about it. Or do something.  I really can’t stand these books where the protagonist does not care about their own life.  At the end she has generally transactional sex with the old guy, and he says: “was it everything you dreamed of?” Maybe I’m naïve but it was gross.  I think I’d rather be naïve than whatever this is.

However it did have fun parts.  How is this:

I watched a young woman shelve cough syrup for a while.  She seemed calm, sapced out, like she was on the cough syrup herself. It was the same look I’d seen on the face of the shopgirl the night before.  Boredom so total it delivered you to the astral plane.  I knew the feeling from my agent’s assistant days, my audience page days, my receptionist days.  You could function in that zone. Answer the phone or take an inventory of the supply closet . . . Meanwhile your brain made the connecting sound of the early internet and played a video of a dog you’d never laid eyes on running through a field.

God this takes me back to temping!

I really enjoyed this one, as have many others – it is on many ‘Book Of They Year’ lists.  It tells about a woman living in the suburbs outside New York who has an affair, first imaginary, and then real.  It’s generally very funny, but also rather sad.  Saying ‘it’s about an affair,’ might make you think it’s some kind of tragic love story, but in fact it’s more about boredom and mortality. 

There is a lot of angst about having decided to leave the city for upstate New York: “People back in Brooklyn thought you were Henry David Thoreau, but then they came to visit and saw that you lived in a vinyl-siding house.  It was only rustic in that you could not get good Thai food.”

There’s also career angst.  The main character, Cora, has a dull job, having downgraded her ambition around network television after an internship showed her how much work it was:

“To do something you believed in or enjoyed, you had to throw yourself at it like Eliot or Jules. Cora’s mom had envisioned her as a no-nonsense lady, like Barbara Walters or Gayle King. It had hurt her to learn that Cora was, in fact, nonsense.”

And then comes the affair partner, who when she first sees him she notes: “He wore socks printed with fir trees and a chambray shirt.  His jeans were only mildly terrible.”

This jeans comment really makes me lol. This is indeed the low bar straight women accept from straight men.  So much of the story is about the imaginary affair that when the real affair happens, it is inevitably something of a let down.  I really liked this, as a commentary on the actual affair:  “The shabbiness of real life.  You had to admire its consistency”

It is kind of interesting how the affair does not seem to affect her love for her husband. It’s more her working through her own feelings of emptiness.  I note again, just like SO YOUNG, SO OLD, that friendships are once again presented as difficult and superficial.  I don’t know if that’s just what happens to youwhen you move to the subrubs, but I’m not about ot find out. 

Once the affair is real, the imaginary life becomes one where she has a third child with her husband. I like this line, from an acquaintance, when she decided not to have the child partly because she fears what it will do to her body:

“Your body is going to a grave, said the woman.  To a landfill.  It’s a single-use item.  You might as well wreck it.” 

Here is a book about a group of friends from when they meet in university on until their mid-forties. In short, catnip for me. I read pretty much the whole thing on one pretty sleepless night. Let me give you a flavour. Here is a man’s response to a cheerful text message from his university girlfriend:

“in this text her tone was buoyant, if not overly friendly, which hurt Marco in a way that he hadn’t expected. He thought their history precluded an excessive use of exclamation points.”

This sounds like I enjoyed this book, and I did, but I can’t say it didn’t have it’s issues. I found some of the characters kind of unlikely, the bad boyfriends were extremely bad, the one-who-got-away clearly got away, and etc. But it was still very more-ish.