Nom de Plume

Adriane works in the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Advancement, which is to say that she doesn’t have a very meaningful career. She is single and (at least in the beginning), not too happy about it. She is looking for love in all the wrong places, i.e., her boss. In other words, Adriane is a prime candidate for a great chick lit novel in which girl gets love, girl evolves, girl finds meaning in her life, and then girl lives happily ever after.

Only that isn’t what Adriane On the Edge is about. Nope, not at all. Oh, perhaps in a peripheral, parodic sort of way Adriane stays the course, but she blows off center far too often into the inexplicably bizarre.

For one thing, she is damaged goods. Both her parents committed suicide, which is pretty much guaranteed to put one in lifelong therapy. For another, her choices are far too strange and circumstances seem to conspire against her. She gets arrested as a hooker when dared to flash someone (it’s an undercover cop); she pours her heart out to her court-appointed therapist only to have him die during her session (she thinks he’s asleep); she finally parts with her dead father’s golf clubs by selling them to a swinger (and ends up seeing him, not fully understanding what his lifestyle entails).

Told through a series of chapters — almost shorts — we as readers get slices of Adriane’s life and the often surprising things that happen to her. Sly and humorous, I would recommend.

One postscript: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what does it say when the different sections of a book reminds you of something else? The chapter on the dog chewing her ear off reminded me of the woman who recently had a face transplant. (This, by the way, is a story that disturbs me greatly: the fact that she now wakes up to someone else’s face seems less odd to me than the fact that she never woke up while her dog was chewing off her face, and didn’t realize there was a problem until she tried to light a cigarette.) There’s the one in which she has the removed tumor in a jar on her desk, which reminded me of that Margaret Atwood short story, Hairball. (Read it if you haven’t already.)

Well, I guess I’m a couple years behind the curve on this one, but I finally picked up a company of Eats Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I almost ended up not reading it at all after the introduction by Frank McCourt, who really bugs the living daylights out of me. (Oh, sure I devoured Angela’s Ashes like everyone else when it came out, but the subsequent book was full of a brogued whine that was hard to take — “Ach! Poor me, an innocent Irish lad.” I suppose it was well-punctuated though.)

But you know what? Truss is hysterically funny and she illuminates punctuation with grace, ease, and a lot of humor. I’m glad to see that I’m not alone in bemoaning the errant apostrophes of vegetable stands and in shop windows. I’m happy to discover that I am not the only one completely addicted to the semicolon. In other words, I have found my peeps!

She also gives a history of each punctuation mark. When did it first appear? What was it initially used for? Truss answers all these questions, throws in a good many literary references and trivia — and the result is a delightful book. I did have some minor quibbles with some of her preferences; for example, she decries comma overuse while I think she could use a few more. But those are personal preferences and are neither here nor there.

Dannie Faber has the perfect life: she is a successful children’s book illustrator; her grown children are doing well; she spends most of her time living in a modest house on Cape Cod, where she feels most at peace. Then we discover that her husband Tom, who teaches at MIT, lives primarily in their their house in Boston. And in the beginning we accept this with equanimity — after all, there are many different types of relationships.

Then a wealthy hotel magnate constructs a monstrous house reviled by the neighborhood — the trophy house of the title — disurbing Dannie’s equilibrium in more ways than one. Her 30-year old daughter comes home because of a failed relationship and an existential crisis due to unfulfilling work. The book editor that she has worked with for years wants to meet in New York in person. Tom, who has been distant, embarks upon an affair and leaves her. She begins her own affair with the editor, David. Even her best friend on the Cape isn’t immune from change; she quits running her bed and breakfast and moves in with the hotel tycoon, a crass, materialistic man.

Although Dannie ends up divorced and living with David in New York, she isn’t happy living in the city, and proposes the same compromise that she had with her husband: they live alone and then get together on weekends. And this is what struck me about the novel: she starts out in a marriage that isn’t really a marraige and ends up in a relationship that isn’t really a relationship.

Ultimately, Dannie is someone who has accepted mediocrity. She clearly states that she became an illustrator because she didn’t have the talent to become an artist. She lived with Tom for years, pretending that they were happy. The book closes with her doing the same with David. Although many may not agree, I ultimately found this to be a terrifying book, not because of subject matter or suspense or ominous Jaws-like music or anything like that, but because it so clearly illuminates the compromises we all make to be with the people we love.