What: The unnamed heroine of Patricia Marx's novel is working on her graduate thesis in Cambridge when she falls for narcissist Eugene Obello. The affair doesn't end well for the narrator. Later, working as a TV writer in New York City, she again encounters the now-married Eugene. Again, things don't go so well. Her obsession with the boring, miserable, selfish Eugene is inexplicable to her friends, the reader, and often herself. Marx, a former writer for Saturday Night Live and the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, has written a very funny tragedy/very tragic comedy.
Comparable to: Same type of sense of humor as David Rakoff, Sloane Crosley, David Sedaris, etc. But this is a novel, not a collection of essays or stories.
Representative quote: "The entire first year, gosh, I was happy. I was a foreigner! I'd never been to Europe and now here I was, in a country where everyone sounded like Winston Churchill or Mary Poppins; where all the women had flawless skin and all the men looked as if they'd been wandering around in the Underground since World War II, never having seen the light of day or another change of clothes."
Explanation of further would-be representative quotes: So, I'm not going to include an example of this here, because it wouldn't make sense out of context, but my favorite part of the book is that the narrator periodically polls her friends for their opinions about her life.
You might not like it if: The inexplicable nature of the Eugene obsession is a persistent bother that doesn't go away.
How to get it: Frankly, the paperback is super-cheap on Amazon right now. If you're interested.
No comments:
Post a Comment