Adriane On the Edge - Paul Mandelbaum
by Zia ~ February 23rd, 2006. Filed under: Books.
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.)