Friday Flashback: Rec. #58: Him Her Him Again the End of Him

I decided to start doing Friday Flashbacks in case you missed some early posts the first time around. You're busy; I understand.

What: The unnamed heroine of Patricia Marx's novel is working on her graduate thesis in Cambridge when she falls for a boring, miserable, selfish narcissist named Eugene Obello. Things do not go very well. 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: "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."

You might not like it if: The deliberately inexplicable nature of the Eugene obsession is a persistent bother that doesn't go away.

How to get it: The paperback is super-cheap on Amazon right now. If you're interested.



[Originally posted 2/26/11.]