#9 - The Penny Pinchers Club

Hey, I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about taking 6 months to find a new job. After all, when even the chick lit puts on a recession theme, you know times have been hard. Such is The Penny Pinchers Club, by Sarah Strohmeyer (New York: Dutton, 2009). In a nutshell, this one has its share of plot holes, but still made for an entertaining afternoon.

From the dust jacket: "Living in New Jersey -- the state that boasts the most malls per capita -- Kat's favorite recreational activity is a no-brainer: shopping. But when she discovers that her husband, Griff, has been hiding a secret bank account and exchanging dubious e-mails with his attractive young assistant, her joyful consumerism suddenly loses its appeal. Are their fights about money more serious than she understood? Is he, as her friends suggest, preparing for a divorce? Just in case, Kat decides it's time to start saving. Unfortunately, having racked up tens of thousands of dollars in debt (of course she needed those tiki torches from Pier 1!), Kat finds herself in way over her head.

"Drastic times call for drastic measures. Kat starts by canceling cable and kicking her $240 monthly Starbucks habit. But what starts out as a simple effort to cut costs soon becomes an over-the-top obsession when she joins an eclectic but lovable group of savers called the Penny Pinchers Club. Soon she is pumping her gas at dawn (when it is thicker) and serving dinner made from food she retrieved at the grocery store Dumpster. Kat is saving money, to be sure, but what she's really saving is time -- time she spends with Griff, their daughter ... and an old flame, who resurfaces at precisely the wrong moment, offering Kat a life where money is no object."

The premise is pretty entertaining, and much like Prospect Park West, has "screenplay" written all over it. The trouble starts when Kat, on the eve of their twentieth wedding anniversary, finds two wrappers from Trojan Mint Tingle condoms in husband Griff's suitcase as she's unpacking from his latest business trip ... and then an expensive restaurant receipt from a night when he'd allegedly turned in early at his hotel. Turns out, the latter was paid for with a MasterCard that (as far as Kat knows) they've never owned. With some encouragement and help from big sister Viv and Viv's accountant friend Adele, Kat does some digging, finds the aforementioned secret bank account, and consults infamous divorce lawyer Toni Feinzig -- all the while saying nothing to Griff, on the advice of her new lawyer:

"'[I]f you confront your husband now with virtually no assets to your name besides the ones you two hold mutually, you will only be hurting yourself in the long run since there is a very strong possibility that he'll call your bluff and declare immediately that he's leaving you, at which point you will be on your own."

Of course, ferocious lawyers don't come cheap, so there's the rub: Kat has 8 months (till June, when daughter Laura graduates high school and, she expects, Griff will leave her for his PYT assistant, Bree) in which to save $15,000 for Toni's retainer. Desparate situations, desparate measures, so she finally succumbs to cleaning lady Libby's invitations to join the Penny Pinchers Club. She's clearly over her head here, and on hearing about her baby steps -- switching to take-out instead of sit-down service at the sushi bar, finding gas for ten cents less a gallon, cutting out Starbucks -- the Pinchers are about to show her the door ... until she spills about Griff's infidelity. At this point, they take pity on her, and stage a massive audit and intervention: cancel cable, the landline, and Netflix; share a wireless connection with the neighbors; even trade in the Lexus -- all with the goal of saving (ulp!) $500 a week.

Kat digs in with gusto, which is one of the weaker points in the plot. Sure, her good intentions make sense, especially given the magnitude of the threat she's facing ... but as someone who's taken many trips down the frugal highway, I have a hard time believing that not just Kat, but her family, just blithely accept all these sudden, drastic changes in their lifestyle with nary a backward glance. To change any habit takes time, and rarely goes quite as smoothly as it's presented here.

Likewise, I don't fully buy Kat's decision to finally, after 20+ years, start taking steps to break free from her unreasonably demanding boss and start her own interior design business at precisely the same time she's expecting her marriage to collapse. OK, she is presented as not being terribly financially savvy, and the new business provides the vehicle for bringing ex-boyfriend Liam -- now hugely successful, and the owner of a historic estate in desparate need of remodeling -- back into the picture, but c'mon -- why now? Wouldn't you think someone in deep financial doo-doo, and expecting it to get worse, would want to hold onto a steady job just a wee bit longer?

Surprisingly, I mostly liked the ending. It didn't happen exactly as I'd expected, which is always a relief. While I did take issue with how the author resolves the question of Griff's infidelity, I can't see a better way to do it without a major rewrite -- and who knows where that might have led.

And right now, my watch is leading me to wrap it up -- I've got one of my last ladies-who-lunch dates downtown in half an hour -- so that's it for now. I'll likely hit the library on the way home, and I'm due for a major return and restock, so stay tuned.

#8 - Prospect Park West

Another brace of light, entertaining "Chick Lit" books in this, my last week of penurious leisure. And, y'know, I'm starting to feel a little bloated, as if I'd eaten a whole bag of Milanos in one sitting.

Even so, Prospect Park West, by Amy Sohn (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), was pretty much what I expected: a lives-of-the-upper-middle-class satire that neither demands nor surprises too much. As the jacket blurb suggests, the book follows the stories of four restless young mothers in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood:

"Brooklyn's famed Park Slope neighborhood has it all: sprawling, majestic Prospect Park; acclaimed public schools; historic brownstones; and progressive values. Among bohemian bourgeois breeders, claiming a stake in Park Slope has become a competitive sport.

"In the park, at the coffee shops, and on the playgrounds of the neighborhood, four women's lives come together during one long, hot Brooklyn summer. Melora Leigh, a two-time Oscar-winning actress, frustrated with her career and the pressures of raising her adopted toddler, feels the seductive pull of kleptomania; Rebecca Rose, missing the robust sex life of her pre-motherhood days, begins a dangerous flirtation with a handsome neighborhood celebrity; Lizzie O'Donnell, a former lesbian (or 'hasbian'), wonders why she is still drawn to women in spite of her sexy husband and adorable baby; and Karen Bryan Shapiro finds herself consumed by two powerful obsessions: her four-year-old son's well-being and snagging the ultimate three-bedroom apartmentin a well-maintained, P.S. 321-zoned co-op building. As the women's paths intertwine (and sometimes collide), each must struggle to keep her man, her sanity ... and her playdates."

Some reviews (warning: the title of the second isn't family- or work-friendly) suggest that PPW is funny only if you know the neighborhood. I don't think that's true; personally, the closest I come is occasionally visiting friends in Prospect Heights, which Sohn dubs "ToPoSlo" -- Too Poor for the Slope -- but I was still entertained. Sure, there are local variations, but competitive mothering is still competitive mothering. (Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that Sohn includes a shout-out to my own adopted home town, calling it "Park Slope outside of the city" and "a community ... with cool, smart artistic people who weren't boring or at all suburban.")

The first review I read calls the book mean-spirited, and I guess to some extent, that's true. The four principals are somewhat one-dimensional. Rebecca and Karen are the most interesting, but not particularly likeable; Lizzie is the only likeable one, but not terribly compelling; and Melora (reportedly based loosely on Brooklyn-born actress Jennifer Connelly) is just plain annoying. Nonetheless, it has some funny moments. The Park Slope Food Coop (here, the "Prospect Park Food Coop") features prominently, and will ring true for anyone with a co-op background: the leftover hippies, the all-too-earnest member-worker responsibilities, the obligatory protest. Karen's overprotective mothering makes her neighbors wonder if her son, the ridiculously-named Darby, is disabled somehow, what with the knee pads and all. A post from a local couple "into soft swinging" on the Park Slope Parents web site piques the lonely Lizze's interest, but draws an avalanche of outrage from most of her neighbors: "'My parents were swingers in the '70s and as a result I have been in psychotherapy my entire adult life.' 'This is not the forum for such inquiries. Why don't you post this on an AOL chat room instead of polluting our parenting board with your sick desires?' And the predictable 'I'm definitely interested in swinging but usually it's at the playground with my son Jasper.'" And Rebecca's encounters with "the sanctimommies," who chide her for leaving daughter Abbie with a sitter two afternoons a week and practice elimination communication with their six-month olds (albeit with mixed results), are hilarious.

Again, this wasn't a life-altering book, but I did appreciate the somewhat ambiguous ending. I don't do full-on spoilers, but will say Karen learns too late that her coveted Carroll Street co-op isn't quite what she expected, and Rebecca's sex-starved fling with Melora's hunky Aussie husband Stuart is, er, both briefer and longer-lasting than she'd anticipated. There was one plot line involving Melora's light-fingeredness and Karen's social climbing that wrapped up a little too quickly and neatly for my tastes, but hey -- you can't have everything.

How to Buy a Love of Reading

This one was underwhelming. As I said in an earlier post, I gave a former colleague a copy of Tanya Egan Gibson's How to Buy a Love of Reading (New York: Dutton, 2009) as a going-away gift earlier this year. Then and now, I picked it out for a few reasons: the title intrigued me, and how could I not be drawn to a book that satirizes the uber-rich of Long Island's North Shore?

Jacket blurb: "To Carley Wells, words are the enemy. Her tutor's innumerable SAT flashcards. Her personal trainer's 'fifty-seven pounds overweight' assessment. And the endless assignments from her English teacher, Mr. Nagel. When Nagel reports to her parents that she has answered the question 'What is your favorite book?' with 'Never met one I liked,' they decide to fix what he calls her 'intellectual impoverishment.' They will commission a book to be written just for her -- one she'll have to love -- that will impress her teacher and the whole town of Fox Glen with their family's devotion to the arts. They will be patrons -- the Medicis of Long Island. They will buy their daughter the love of reading.

"Impossible though it is for Carley to imagine loving books, she is in love with a young bibliophile who cares about them more than anything. Anything, that is, but a good bottle of scotch. Hunter Cay, Carley's best friend and Fox Glen's resident golden boy, is becoming a stranger to her lately as he drowns himself in F. Scott Fitzgerald, booze, and Vicodin.

"When the Wellses move writer Bree McEnroy -- author of a failed meta-novel about Odysseus's journey home through the Internet -- into their mansion to write Carley's book, Carley's sole interest in the project is to distract Hunter from drinking and give them something to share. But as Hunter's behavior becomes erratic and dangerous, she finds herself increasingly drawn into the fictional world Bree has created, and begins to understand for the first time the power of stories -- those we read, those we want to believe in, and most of all, those we tell ourselves about ourselves. Stories powerful enough to destroy a person. Or save her."

Sounds like it could be good, but didn't quite live up to its potential. Carley has all the makings of a compelling, make-you-root-for-the-underdog heroine -- love for a boy she can't have and who, frankly, doesn't deserve it; shallow mom from hell -- but not enough substance to make you get past your pity and truly like her. And Bree, the working-class writer with literary pretensions and her own bad-rich-boy skeleton in the closet, might have the substance, but we don't see enough of it to know. It gets a bit better as it goes on, but frankly, much of the book is as muddied and meta- as Gibson pokes fun at Bree's failed novel for being.

More quickies

Also recently finished 2 young adult books of note.

I read Cynthia Voight's Homecoming (New York: Athenium, 1981) with Littlehazel; finished it a week ago. Wow. Homecoming is the first book in Voight's seven-volume Tillerman cycle, and I can't believe I never came across the books before. It tells the story of four siblings, ranging in age from 13 to 6, who are abandoned in the parking lot of a shopping mall on the Rhode Island-Connecticut border by their poor and emotionally fragile mother. Their father walked out of their lives before the youngest child's birth, and they know no other friends or relatives to turn to, so Dicey, the eldest (with some input from brainy, 10 year old James), decides their only option is to walk to Bridgeport, where their mother had been taking them, in search of an elderly aunt they've never met. Book One follows their journey; Book Two chronicles what happens after they arrive, only to find Aunt Cilla dead, and her daughter, cousin Eunice, not quite what they'd expected.

Interesting to read this while Littlehazel's class was doing a project on survival stories. We've read Island of the Blue Dolphins and Julie of the Wolves, but a tale of survival in a mostly contemporary setting (cheaper food and fewer restrictions on unaccompanied kids notwithstanding) is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. We're partway through the sequel, Dicey's Song, as I speak. An excellent parent-and-child or teacher-and-student read-aloud (or read-together).

The second YA book was Here's to You, Rachel Robinson, by Judy Blume (New York: Orchard Books, 1993) -- and OK, I can't blame this on my daughter; this one was just me. Like most girls of a certain age, I loved Judy Blume's books as a grade-schooler, and can't resist picking 'em up when I stumble on them now -- especially ones like this that were published long after I'd outgrown the genre. This is a sequel to Just as Long as We're Together, which Littlehazel owns, and which both of us have read. Here, though, the protagonist isn't Stephanie, but her gifted best friend Rachel, who, in seventh grade, has more than enough on her plate. Older brother Charles has been kicked out of boarding school and seems to delight in making the family's life hell. And frankly, between mom's pending judicial appointment, big sister Jessica's cystic-acne-and-prom troubles, and cousin Tarren's single parenthood, there's not much room for Rachel to be anything less than perfect. Stephanie and Allison, the new girl from Just as Long, seem to spend more time together and have more in common than Rachel does with either of them. And if that's not enough, her teachers and friends are pushing her to join yet more school activities, from natural helpers to class president to ... argh! It's enough to make you want to scream. In short, Blume does indeed still have it, writing for grade schoolers and tweens in a way that's realistic without being preachy.

No Impact Man

I think this one wins the "longest title yet" prize, and of course, is yet another addition to a growing list of books that aren't the classics. Oh well.

Also read No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process, by Colin Beavan (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009). For those of you who somehow missed all the press, check Beavan's blog or this review. Liked this one more than I thought I would, probably because I was prepared for Beavan to come off as far more arrogant and self-righteous than he did.

Scroogenomics

OK, folks, welcome to Book Blog Lite. I've gotten more than a little behind in this not-so-noble endeavor, returned several of these books to the library already, and am madly trying to wrap things up before (whoohooh!) I start a new job next week. Sooo, these will be quick.

I read Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays, by Joel Waldfogel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) last week. Naturally, I love books like this that apply economic concepts to everyday, stuff-real-people-care-about behavior. Do I buy every last bit of Waldfogel's thesis? No. Do I think he's really a grinch who, given half the chance, would steal Christmas? Not really. Still an entertaining read, though, and a quick one to boot. Check Amazon or this review for more details, but I liked it.

When resolutions go south

It's always around this time in January that New Year's resolutions start to crumble, at least for me. And yes, I know it's only been two weeks. But they've been two VERY cold weeks, and ... well, enough with the excuses. Point is, despite all my lofty intentions of reading Good Literature this year (weellll, I never said I was going to be exclusive), what do I pick up? South of Broad, by Pat Conroy (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2009).

Jacket blurb: Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a respected Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of ten, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X -- and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades, from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for."

End result? Conroy's another decent author I've enjoyed in the past (The Lords of Discipline, loosely based on the author's own years at The Citadel, is a favorite re-read of mine), this is his first new novel in more than a decade ... and while I wouldn't go so far as to say I was disappointed, I also wasn't overly impressed. The novel tells the story of a young Charleston boy/ man, from the start of his senior year in high school in 1969 up through Hurricane Hugo and its aftermath in 1989 (albeit not in linear fashion). Our narrator is named after the protagonist in James Joyce's Ulysses by his formidable mother, high school principal Lindsay King. We learn two things almost immediately: first, Leo (and quite probably Pat Conroy) is absolutely besotted with Charleston. OK, I've never been, so perhaps this is normal, but it seemed a bit over the top (though admittedly, after Lords of Discipline, not completely unfamiliar).

Second, and more significant to the novel's plot, is that Leo and his family have been, as the jacket indicates, utterly shattered by his brother's suicide. And understandably so; Steve (Stephen Dedalus King, of course) was a golden boy, a perfect brother and son, and only ten years old ... and it was Leo who found him, dead in the bathtub after somehow slitting his wrists and his throat. The "why" doesn't come out till the very end, though astute readers may have a good suspicion early on. When the story opens, it's been 9 years, and Leo's just now rebuilding some sort of life for himself, after several years in a mental hospital, followed by an arrest and probation (a star football player planted cocaine on him at a party, and Leo refused to name the guy). His principal-mother makes it abundantly clear he'll never make up for his crimes, though this may really just mean he'll never be Stephen. Nonetheless, she instructs him to take several newcomers to school under his wing: the aforementioned Poe twins, ethereal, non-Charlestonian creatures who've just moved in across the street; the Whiteheads, carted in each day from their orphanage; Chad and Molly, who transfer to Peninsula High after being kicked out of a ritzy private school for cocaine; and (curiously unmentioned on the dust jacket) Ike Jefferson, son of Peninsula's first black football coach and Leo's co-captain on the team.

With the jacket blurb and the above lead-in, it's not too surprising that this motley crew of (mostly) outsiders become fast friends, and remain so twenty years later. Not surprising, but also not especially believable -- and too overly dramatic. I've been putting off finishing this review for a while, so without further delay: worth a read on a slow day, but not especially memorable.