Not (Just) Fiction

I want to believe in it.

It is a first novel from an editor of Time who has contributed to the New Yorker, a book with an eye-catching cover, caught in pole position on the 8-shaped display in the public library’s section for new fiction.

It has been a long time since I read fiction. The most recent additions to the stack of “have read” titles are books on mapmaking, organic farming and the Spanish language, so my palette could be considered fully cleansed. When I started reading this book of fiction this morning with toast and orange juice I snorted in disgust at the main character’s self assessment, his chapter-long rumination on how he is an attractive, financially comfortable gentleman in his mid-twenties who believes in romance and love at first sight. This character is doing nothing more than sitting in a window seat on a plane, waiting to see who his seatmate will be, believing there is a fair chance that true love could stow her luggage and plop down beside him.

Of course the booking agent of fate obliges him, and the couple has their moment; the reader is introduced to the magical girlfriend from whom the protagonist will be separated until the penultimate chapter.

Still midmorning, chapter two begins. I put that book down hard enough to rattle the bowl of peanuts on the table, and myself, and regarded the enticing cover I’d judged worthy of my return to fiction.

“It’s not that good.”

Markets - two of them. Phone calls to relatives. Laundry. Bills. I picked it up again and it didn’t get any better. Rivals in the lovers’ lives screw them in the most obvious ways. Rivals get fired or die (if they are bad) and conspire to help the lovers (if they are good).

The self-sacrificing lovers rarely take any initiative, and it seems as if the author was aware of this. The girl’s father - an intuitive film director whose description suspiciously channels the author’s headshot - berates the young man for standing impotently in the background while watching his love slip into the arms of another man, his own boss.

I put the book down again. 10:00 p.m. Even a novelist’s awareness can’t save this book, and yet, against all logic and my sense of smugness, I continue to read with a lump in my throat. He does so many things wrong, tells me to love his flat-perfect protagonists, dumbing down their foes and deifying ex machina allies in service to the long delayed love plot. I should hate this. I do hate this. I drop the book on the floor just past eleven and look down upon the epilogue.

I still want to believe in it, even when it isn’t cool.

Do they have irony parties? Sarcasm luncheons? Cynic meet-and-greets? Until they do, I want to believe in it.

The good end up happy, the bad, unhappily.

I want to believe in it.