"Like a heart attack, the love kind": More Sweet Valley Confidential

Here is a belated list of writing tics and annoying bologna that I wish would stop within the text of Sweet Valley Confidential:

1. The attempts to give Jessica's dialogue some Valley Girl flair. Between the "like"s that turn up sprinkled throughout her sentences like so many poisoned Reese's Pieces on a cup of TCBY fro-yo that are not comma delimited, like God and MLA intended, and her sometimes-italicized, sometimes-not use of "so" for emphasis, I'm about ready to go blind.
2. The "friend" overuse continues to run rampant. Bruce and Elizabeth both refer to each other as "friend," like it's a pronoun. It is so...okay, I ran through the following adjecives; feel free to pick one: creepy, odd, off-putting, artificial, weird.

So developments that have taken place...

1. Bruce Patman, everyone's favorite Porsche-driving, girl-banging, arrogant prick, is, naturally, in love with Elizabeth Wakefield, his best friend. (Oh, and I'll save you the excruciating work that Kate and I put into trying to remember the name of the title where Regina snorts coke and dies: it's #40, On the Edge)
2. Steven Wakefield, who many of you remember for his tragic love affair with Tricia "Who Had Leukemia" Martin, married Cara Walker... and then got his gay on with Aaron Dallas, who has one blue eye and one brown eye, like a husky (awwwwwwwwwwww) (and don't worry, fans, Jessica still has her bizarro damn-the-social-mores attraction to her brother, even if he does like dudes now)
3. Winston Egbert, everyone's favorite third-string Jughead, morphed into a storyline from The Social Network (which I guess is a documentary or something?) and was a rich dot-com genius with no real friends because he was an asshole who was shitty to women.
4. Then he died.
5. By plunging off a balcony while drunk.
6. I know, right?
7. There were approximately 1 billion flashback sequence, until time and space folded in on itself and there was a flashback of the same anticlimactic confrontation between Jessica, Jessica's rich-not-quite-abusive husband, Elizabeth, and Todd told from both Jessica AND Elizabeth's perspectives. You know, like that Japanese movie about rape using multi-POV narrative that I still haven't seen, or an Italo Calvino novel, or...

 Pretty much. Though to be fair, in Elizabeth's flashback, she includes that she roars, "inside my car, with the windows closed, I roar in pain. Like a wounded animal." So clearly hers is the better flashback, because she makes me think of a 27-year-old blonde size-4 yawping like a sea lion who has been battered by sharks.

The Bruce Patman section is--I say this confidently--easily the worst part of the book thus far. Bruce's parents die in a horrible car accident (his mother instantly, his father after six days of coma), and the grinding, flop-sweaty effort to redeem Bruce is embarrassing to experience.

"It was in those endless hours in the chill of the hospital waiting room, waiting for the miracle that didn't come, that Bruce's life changed. He let the change in [ed. note: consequently, he also let the sun shine, let the sun shine in, the sun...shine in]. It was almost overnight. When he came out of grieving, he knew he was different."

And just when you think it can't get worse, Bruce narrates falling in love with Elizabeth as she ministers to his grief:

"She comes every day [heh heh heh], and I wait for her. But it's a different wait. When I see her coming from the elevator my heart starts to speed up and I feel my breath coming in shallow gasps [dude, get that shit checked out]. Like a heart attack, the love kind."

I'll let you roll that over in your mind. Try saying it out loud. Do it. I dare you.

And if you're done either weeping from the pain, or have regained your breath after the nearly paralyzing laughter, I will direct you to the next passage where Bruce says he is "better now, able to control the physical symptoms, but the ache for her is still there, the longing and the love." So...are the physical symptoms...like, the mild heart attack you had that first time? Or...boners? Bruce, point to how you feel here:

I will now subject you to my complaining that this book's obsession with redemption or, I don't know, growth as a person, as "new" vs. "old," e.g., "old Bruce would have x"* or "old Jessica would have y." It is eerie. It's like this novel is the portrayal of the weird robotic humanoids of The Island or something. The delineation is very exact, leaves little room for the idea that someone has room for multifacetedness or, I don't know, a second dimension. You can change and adjust behaviors and personality traits and not be a robot. I think.

On a different topic, I don't even know what to do with Steven's thought that "Sometimes [he] was struck by how heterosexual his homosexuality was." What the shit does that even mean? Just because Steve can have teasing, "clever" conversations with his male lover, that's...not gay? But you still have mansex with him, right? Right, Steven? And for your information, being bantery and clever does not just belong to straight people. Jiminy Crickets, Francine Pascal, thanks for letting us know that it does get better...if you let any author other than Francine Pascal portray someone coming out of the closet and living their life with the Husky or soccer player of their choice.

And as if the Wakefield family vibe wasn't incestuous enough back in the day, when Jessica would often admire her shirtless or recently showered brother:

"A thousand times a day [Jessica] needed Elizbeth, needed to see her in a crowd and know she was hers, to touch her skin, to brush her hair, just to push up against her, so natural as not to be noticed, to pluck a piece of lint off her skirt, wipe a crumb from her chin, to be able always to enter into that private space that everyone else holds around them, inviolable."

Hey, everyone, I've got some really beautiful flowers. They're in the attic. Want to come up and see them? Have sex with each other?

So friends--if I may call you "friend," and be sure to address you as "friend" often, so you are absolutely crystal clear as to where our relationship stands, and that if the song "You've Got A Friend" ever plays over the speakers while we are at a bar, I probably put it on the TouchTunes--I closed the book just as Elizabeth was entering the country club with Liam, the Irish Bartender--that's right, the virtual stranger did accompany her to her grandmother's 80th birthday, where she is almost certain to make something of a scene with her twin sister who once bonked her sister's ex-boyfriend ohhhhhhhh I'm dizzy. I know that you, like me, look forward to the absolute lack of drama that will no doubt be generated from the fallout.

Friend.


*For example, do you know what "old Bruce" would have done? Tried to get Elizabeth Wakefield to go all the way with him, even though she clearly had a metal plate in her head or dissociative personality disorder, in #7 Dear Sister!

Boy, that was a good one.