Showing posts with label bookIT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bookIT. Show all posts
Sunday, May 8, 2011
For fans of fine wooly mustaches and/or Scott Grimes
Thursday, May 5, 2011
"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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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)
- 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.
- Then he died.
- By plunging off a balcony while drunk.
- I know, right?
- 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...
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.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Sweet Valley Confidential II: Spoiler Alert--Everyone Continues to Not Get Laid
I've progressed nearly 40 pages, and I have to tell you that on the bus this morning, as I was reading, I very nearly broke out sweating, the dialogue was so painful. My reaction was so visceral, it reminded me of Kevin Murphy's account of going to see Corky Romano in the theater with Mike Nelson ("The whole movie hurts. We're sitting on coarse-grit sandpaper.")
I mean, honestly, take this flirty (read: puzzling, poorly translated from Telenovela Spanish to English) exchange betwixt Elizabeth and former object-of-hate, Todd-almost-lookalike Will:
"Elizabeth Show Survey! [ed. note: okay, I admit, using the magazine as Elizabeth's last name sort of made me laugh; you win this round, Sweet Valley Confidential] That sucks. I'm actually one of the the nicest, kindest guys you'll ever meet."
"How come when I asked you to answer a couple of questions you nearly bit my head off?" [asked Elizabeth flirtily-barifly]
"Hey, I'm an angry young playwright. What was I supposed to do?"
Question: how many Os can one stick in the word "Groan" before it becomes overindulgent overstatement? Ten? Twelve?
So their "banter" progresses and they make out a little, but naturally, Elizabeth doesn't put out. I swear she's like the polar opposite of an episode of Red Shoe Diaries (remember that little gem on Showtime? David Duchovny narrates stories where people inexplicably ended up having paint-by-numbers soft-core sex?). And shortly after the two of them have overshared (He left his fiancee and law school for The Theeeeeeeatre! His father, Thurston Howell, is disappointed! Elizabeth, as we are all WELL AWARE, was cheated on by her boyfriend AND TWIN SISTER!) and drunkenly made out, the natural progression of such an acquaintence is to call the dude and have the following phone conversation shortly after not even giving the dude a my-pants-are-a-no-fly-zone BJ:
Even though it was ridiculously early in the relationship, Will would probably understand [why Elizabeth is calling with the terrible, terrible idea to invite a near-stranger to fly to the opposite coast with her and attend her grandmother's 80th birthday party in the hopes that it will somehow relieve the sting of seeing Cheater McGee and Cipher Todd]. Without wasting a moment in sensible thinking [yeah, why do that? That's for losers and well-written three-dimensional characters who don't act like desperate Lifetime Movie villainesses], Elizabeth looked up [Will's] number and dialed.
"Hello," Will said. She could tell he had been sleeping off the martinis.
"Hi, it's Elizabeth."
That woke him. "You're coming back?" [Poor deluded sap; prepare to have that half-mast woody dashed into flaccidity, sucka!]
"No, not today anyway, but maybe soon [said the cocktease].
[Blah blah stuff about the play, I will spare you all, who cares]
"Actually, I'm calling about a big favor from a new friend" [said Elizabeth]
"Am I the new friend?" [said Will]
[blah blah Elizabeth asks him to fly to California, creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy]
"I would really love to go with you and shove it to that sister and her lying, cheating fiance [that's right, folks, this guy is a playwright], but they would never let me leave, even for a day. [Blah blah I'm thinking about getting a restraining order] I'm really sorry, Elizabeth. Am I still your new friend?"
"Forever."
At this juncture, I actually audibly groaned, like I was struck with appendicitis or food poisoning. Does Francine Pascal know the definition of the word "friend?" The overuse of the word reminds me of Frankenstein, seconds before he snapped a child's neck. Its awkwardness and artificiality make the dialogue read as creepy or mentally handicapped or...well, Frankenstein.
I'm waiting for the villagers of NYC to gather outside Elizabeth's apartment building with torches and pitchforks. I'd almost take the vacuous and idiotic Carrie Bradshaw approach to fun, flirty, single NYC living over this. There. I said it.
And to make matters weirder and more oddly contradictory, Elizabeth, with Will's help, ham-handedly put together a half-scheme for Elizabeth to invite Liam, the "black Irish" bartender to Sweet Valley instead. Who is even MORE of a stranger than Will, mind you. It's like the entire sequence is a setup for a PSA about the dangers of Craigslist or something. "Hey, that bartender that was giving me the sex eye seemed nice. I should ask him to accompany me on a trip. I certainly won't end up splashed on the cover of the New York Post as missing! L&O: SVU won't then rip my disappearance and subsequent corpsical discovery from the headlines!"
Like all plot progressions thus far, Liam conveniently/nonsensically is a California transplant who has been meaning to go see his Irish surgeon dad (I know, right? My reaction was the same as yours...that is, if you just RCA Dogged the screen and made a Tim Allen noise). So that worked out swimmingly. Until the murdering begins, that is. Because everything is a James Patterson novel or an SVU episode in my mind. Thanks, NBC Movie of the Week Starring Fred Savage Where He Domestically Abused, Then Murdered Candace Cameron!
And that isn't even the weirdest part:
Additionally, what she'd taken for romantic interest on his part wasn't realy there. And that nonfeeling was mutual and comfortable.
Say what, girlfriend? I mean, I'm pretty sure it was mere pages ago that you were all:
Elizabeth watched the bartender [blah blah hey kids buy Stolichnaya] eyes fixed on her all the while, mixing the drink by feel. Even without the alcohol, she was beginning to cheer up, though he was definitely wasting his time on her.
"Olive?" he asked, pouring the chilled liquid into a martini glass and making the single word sound positively loving, flashing a dimple that was almost overkill.
So readers, I have determined that, much like Humbert Humbert, Elizabeth Wakefield is what the literary nerd set call an "unreliable narrator." By the time she kills her sister in a jealous rage and we all meet for book club, one of our discussion questions will be: "Was Elizabeth sane or insane? Can we trust that what she shared with us regarding her internal conflict was genuine? Also: does Elizabeth know what a friend is? Is she The Bride of Frankenstein?"
Onto another topic, I've realized why the flashback sections are so off-putting: they are written in present tense! What a jarring narrative decision, Francine. Well, also the flashbacks are stupid. That doesn't help. Did you know that Jessica was married to a possessive, borderline-abusive rich guy for four months? And lived on a yacht? And escaped, much like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, to a small town? Only she didn't fake her death and, one assumes, Patrick Bergin will not track her down to straighten her towels and stalk her? Yep!
I have this sense that all these various threads of sensational half-stories (or, in Elizabeth's own words, "enough family turmoil to start a new HBO series"), the introduction of various "frieeeeeend"s who are barely established, not useful for sex scenes, and awkwardly shoehorned into Elizabeth's ongoing 2.5-on-a-scale-of-10 efforts to get revenge or vent her spleen at Jessica will pan out to nothing.
Thus making me more irritated and eager to make fun of it. So good deal, I guess.
Next up: oh, my word, Jessica works for an ecologically-friendly makeup start-up. Mercy.
I mean, honestly, take this flirty (read: puzzling, poorly translated from Telenovela Spanish to English) exchange betwixt Elizabeth and former object-of-hate, Todd-almost-lookalike Will:
"Elizabeth Show Survey! [ed. note: okay, I admit, using the magazine as Elizabeth's last name sort of made me laugh; you win this round, Sweet Valley Confidential] That sucks. I'm actually one of the the nicest, kindest guys you'll ever meet."
"How come when I asked you to answer a couple of questions you nearly bit my head off?" [asked Elizabeth flirtily-barifly]
"Hey, I'm an angry young playwright. What was I supposed to do?"
Question: how many Os can one stick in the word "Groan" before it becomes overindulgent overstatement? Ten? Twelve?
So their "banter" progresses and they make out a little, but naturally, Elizabeth doesn't put out. I swear she's like the polar opposite of an episode of Red Shoe Diaries (remember that little gem on Showtime? David Duchovny narrates stories where people inexplicably ended up having paint-by-numbers soft-core sex?). And shortly after the two of them have overshared (He left his fiancee and law school for The Theeeeeeeatre! His father, Thurston Howell, is disappointed! Elizabeth, as we are all WELL AWARE, was cheated on by her boyfriend AND TWIN SISTER!) and drunkenly made out, the natural progression of such an acquaintence is to call the dude and have the following phone conversation shortly after not even giving the dude a my-pants-are-a-no-fly-zone BJ:
Even though it was ridiculously early in the relationship, Will would probably understand [why Elizabeth is calling with the terrible, terrible idea to invite a near-stranger to fly to the opposite coast with her and attend her grandmother's 80th birthday party in the hopes that it will somehow relieve the sting of seeing Cheater McGee and Cipher Todd]. Without wasting a moment in sensible thinking [yeah, why do that? That's for losers and well-written three-dimensional characters who don't act like desperate Lifetime Movie villainesses], Elizabeth looked up [Will's] number and dialed.
"Hello," Will said. She could tell he had been sleeping off the martinis.
"Hi, it's Elizabeth."
That woke him. "You're coming back?" [Poor deluded sap; prepare to have that half-mast woody dashed into flaccidity, sucka!]
"No, not today anyway, but maybe soon [said the cocktease].
[Blah blah stuff about the play, I will spare you all, who cares]
"Actually, I'm calling about a big favor from a new friend" [said Elizabeth]
"Am I the new friend?" [said Will]
[blah blah Elizabeth asks him to fly to California, creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeepy]
"I would really love to go with you and shove it to that sister and her lying, cheating fiance [that's right, folks, this guy is a playwright], but they would never let me leave, even for a day. [Blah blah I'm thinking about getting a restraining order] I'm really sorry, Elizabeth. Am I still your new friend?"
"Forever."
At this juncture, I actually audibly groaned, like I was struck with appendicitis or food poisoning. Does Francine Pascal know the definition of the word "friend?" The overuse of the word reminds me of Frankenstein, seconds before he snapped a child's neck. Its awkwardness and artificiality make the dialogue read as creepy or mentally handicapped or...well, Frankenstein.
I'm waiting for the villagers of NYC to gather outside Elizabeth's apartment building with torches and pitchforks. I'd almost take the vacuous and idiotic Carrie Bradshaw approach to fun, flirty, single NYC living over this. There. I said it.
And to make matters weirder and more oddly contradictory, Elizabeth, with Will's help, ham-handedly put together a half-scheme for Elizabeth to invite Liam, the "black Irish" bartender to Sweet Valley instead. Who is even MORE of a stranger than Will, mind you. It's like the entire sequence is a setup for a PSA about the dangers of Craigslist or something. "Hey, that bartender that was giving me the sex eye seemed nice. I should ask him to accompany me on a trip. I certainly won't end up splashed on the cover of the New York Post as missing! L&O: SVU won't then rip my disappearance and subsequent corpsical discovery from the headlines!"
Like all plot progressions thus far, Liam conveniently/nonsensically is a California transplant who has been meaning to go see his Irish surgeon dad (I know, right? My reaction was the same as yours...that is, if you just RCA Dogged the screen and made a Tim Allen noise). So that worked out swimmingly. Until the murdering begins, that is. Because everything is a James Patterson novel or an SVU episode in my mind. Thanks, NBC Movie of the Week Starring Fred Savage Where He Domestically Abused, Then Murdered Candace Cameron!
And that isn't even the weirdest part:
Additionally, what she'd taken for romantic interest on his part wasn't realy there. And that nonfeeling was mutual and comfortable.
Say what, girlfriend? I mean, I'm pretty sure it was mere pages ago that you were all:
Elizabeth watched the bartender [blah blah hey kids buy Stolichnaya] eyes fixed on her all the while, mixing the drink by feel. Even without the alcohol, she was beginning to cheer up, though he was definitely wasting his time on her.
"Olive?" he asked, pouring the chilled liquid into a martini glass and making the single word sound positively loving, flashing a dimple that was almost overkill.
So readers, I have determined that, much like Humbert Humbert, Elizabeth Wakefield is what the literary nerd set call an "unreliable narrator." By the time she kills her sister in a jealous rage and we all meet for book club, one of our discussion questions will be: "Was Elizabeth sane or insane? Can we trust that what she shared with us regarding her internal conflict was genuine? Also: does Elizabeth know what a friend is? Is she The Bride of Frankenstein?"
Onto another topic, I've realized why the flashback sections are so off-putting: they are written in present tense! What a jarring narrative decision, Francine. Well, also the flashbacks are stupid. That doesn't help. Did you know that Jessica was married to a possessive, borderline-abusive rich guy for four months? And lived on a yacht? And escaped, much like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy, to a small town? Only she didn't fake her death and, one assumes, Patrick Bergin will not track her down to straighten her towels and stalk her? Yep!
I have this sense that all these various threads of sensational half-stories (or, in Elizabeth's own words, "enough family turmoil to start a new HBO series"), the introduction of various "frieeeeeend"s who are barely established, not useful for sex scenes, and awkwardly shoehorned into Elizabeth's ongoing 2.5-on-a-scale-of-10 efforts to get revenge or vent her spleen at Jessica will pan out to nothing.
Thus making me more irritated and eager to make fun of it. So good deal, I guess.
Next up: oh, my word, Jessica works for an ecologically-friendly makeup start-up. Mercy.
Monday, May 2, 2011
BookIT! (without the personal pan pizza): Sweet Valley Confidential
My friend amanjo, knowing my prediliction for Sweet Valley High and Sweet Valley High-related nostalgia, was kind enough to offer me her copy of Sweet Valley Confidential. My initial enthusiasm for buying my own copy to visit my friends, the Wakefield twins, was dampened when she told me that the hardcover release was 20-some bucks (looks like Amazon is kinder). Why, back in my day, when I routinely special-ordered the latest paperback SVH and, to a lesser, not as chastely sexy and glamorous extent, Sweet Valley Twins, a title ran me $2.50! But like I said: amanjo was more impulsive and committed to the concept than I, so I inherited her gently used copy.
It arrived last week in a USPS parcel, and I took my time cracking the cover. I'm a grown-up person with a degree in literature. I've written papers about Age of Innocence and "Twelfth Night" and Things Fall Apart! How could I backpedal into something I've clearly outgrown, with all the education (not to mention the sweet, sweet love of ironic enjoyment) and the adulthood I now possess.
Pretty easily actually. The love of sweet, sweet ironic enjoyment helps a lot.
I'm only about 80 pages in thus far, but one thing is for certain: ELIZABETH WAKEFIELD IS PISSED. The world's most perfect boyfriend, Todd, has apparently cheated on her--once in body, but months in soulmate longing and clandestine meetings at a diner right out of Happy Days or Alice--with her identical twin sister, Jessica. Elizabeth lets you know she is super pissed via internal monologues that occasionally end in awkward swearing (gasp!), as well as odd past-tense passages that are like flashbacks or coma dreams or journal entries. Those also sometimes contain swearing (gasp! I mean, Elizabeth! She was perfect!). She's living a shitty existence in New York as only a character in a cruddily constructed YA novel can: working at a startup magazine dedicated to off-Broadway shows that is crumbling, yet can afford to pay her to do an in-depth piece on a play about Samuel Johnson.
Thus far, she has nearly had sex with her boss (but not really), got serious sex vibes from some amazing "black Irish" (that's a phrase Jessica Wakefield and no other English-speaking human uses, by the bye) bartender (but she didn't wanna), and is engaging in a love-hate relationship with--sigh--a playwright who happens to look almost exactly like Todd.
The teases about how much sex Elizabeth could be having but chooses not to reads like Brian Johnson of The Breakfast Club: next, she's totally going to meet a guy, but none of you will know him, because he's from Niagara Falls.
Meanwhile, Jessica is tormenting herself like Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, only many times stupider. That is, when she's not full of righteous and indignant fury that "matronly" gossip Caroline Pearce (isn't it great, by the way, how all of the characters you knew and loved in Sweet Valley made no efforts to grow or develop or change any of their constrictive two-dimensional roles) is trying to nose out whether Elizabeth has called or forgiven Jessica('s scheming vagina) or is coming to Jessica and Todd's wedding.
Todd is a cipher, made even more of a zero than his high-school self by his cheating, which seems like it is supposed to make sense in the context of the novel, but instead comes across as though it was created in a vacuum, never really the behavior of an actual human person but of a plot point generating robot. The menfolk that litter Elizabeth's lifescape are not much better than a collection of adjectives, eye colors, and hair descriptors. If I may dust off my degree for a moment: the way the male characters are portrayed in this novel suggests, like Jane Austen, that Francine Pascal lived in a society where males and females were largely segregated and, therefore, she has little idea how men think or act and therefore tends to marginalize...okay, well, Austen tended to marginalize, so let's call what Pascal does "straight-up half-pipe fancy-skateboard-move biffs" the male voice. For example, a furious, seemingly straight playwright, when faced with the stunning, everyone-wants-to-sex-her-because-she's-byoooooootiful-but-also-has-a-headache-tonight-honey Elizabeth, finds himself thinking "...why he had been so unfriendly to this beautiful girl. He made up his mind to make her his friend."
Here are some alternate and more believable ways that sentence could have ended:
"He made up his mind to make her his fuck buddy"
"He made up his mind to maker her his concubine"
"...his latest conquest."
"...his plus-one to a hot afterparty."
"...his next teammate on his co-ed dodgeball league."
"...his girlfriend, for crying out Pete."
It's an odd experience reading this thus far. For all I'm sassing, it's almost as though I'm too embarrassed for my young self to make fun of it, because it exposes what a naive dork with poor taste I was. Dave White recently wrote in a review of a tweeny movie, Prom, "because while it’s ostensibly about high school kids, it’s not for them. Instead, it’s a children’s film about how cool it’s going to be when they get to be big and can drive a car and stay up late and go out to a huge party." And that is exactly how I imagine Sweet Valley High would read now. At the tender age of 34, that's certainly how this version of the late 20s is reading...only worse, it's like a kid's idea and execution of a nighttime soap opera like 90210: The Original: big showy fights with awkward transitions and poor use of vocabulary; lots of talk about sex but very little actual sex; the very serious use of the term "soulmate" and "beloved"; a half-baked presentation of "living an artist's life"; everyone has glamorous jobs that all could be the topic of "When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be..." homework.
But who am I kidding? My desire to make fun of all these things, and to find out if Lila Fowler and Ken Matthews really do get divorced, will win out.
Also: I really want to read another poorly executed sex scene like Jessica and Todd's one blazing night of passion, their "mouths furiously pressing, kissing, sucking, inhaling each other" as they "make love with an otherworldly passion."
Which is exactly what 10-year-old Jessie would say, come to think of it. Minus the "poorly executed" adverb-verb combo.
It arrived last week in a USPS parcel, and I took my time cracking the cover. I'm a grown-up person with a degree in literature. I've written papers about Age of Innocence and "Twelfth Night" and Things Fall Apart! How could I backpedal into something I've clearly outgrown, with all the education (not to mention the sweet, sweet love of ironic enjoyment) and the adulthood I now possess.
Pretty easily actually. The love of sweet, sweet ironic enjoyment helps a lot.
I'm only about 80 pages in thus far, but one thing is for certain: ELIZABETH WAKEFIELD IS PISSED. The world's most perfect boyfriend, Todd, has apparently cheated on her--once in body, but months in soulmate longing and clandestine meetings at a diner right out of Happy Days or Alice--with her identical twin sister, Jessica. Elizabeth lets you know she is super pissed via internal monologues that occasionally end in awkward swearing (gasp!), as well as odd past-tense passages that are like flashbacks or coma dreams or journal entries. Those also sometimes contain swearing (gasp! I mean, Elizabeth! She was perfect!). She's living a shitty existence in New York as only a character in a cruddily constructed YA novel can: working at a startup magazine dedicated to off-Broadway shows that is crumbling, yet can afford to pay her to do an in-depth piece on a play about Samuel Johnson.
Thus far, she has nearly had sex with her boss (but not really), got serious sex vibes from some amazing "black Irish" (that's a phrase Jessica Wakefield and no other English-speaking human uses, by the bye) bartender (but she didn't wanna), and is engaging in a love-hate relationship with--sigh--a playwright who happens to look almost exactly like Todd.
The teases about how much sex Elizabeth could be having but chooses not to reads like Brian Johnson of The Breakfast Club: next, she's totally going to meet a guy, but none of you will know him, because he's from Niagara Falls.
Meanwhile, Jessica is tormenting herself like Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, only many times stupider. That is, when she's not full of righteous and indignant fury that "matronly" gossip Caroline Pearce (isn't it great, by the way, how all of the characters you knew and loved in Sweet Valley made no efforts to grow or develop or change any of their constrictive two-dimensional roles) is trying to nose out whether Elizabeth has called or forgiven Jessica('s scheming vagina) or is coming to Jessica and Todd's wedding.
Todd is a cipher, made even more of a zero than his high-school self by his cheating, which seems like it is supposed to make sense in the context of the novel, but instead comes across as though it was created in a vacuum, never really the behavior of an actual human person but of a plot point generating robot. The menfolk that litter Elizabeth's lifescape are not much better than a collection of adjectives, eye colors, and hair descriptors. If I may dust off my degree for a moment: the way the male characters are portrayed in this novel suggests, like Jane Austen, that Francine Pascal lived in a society where males and females were largely segregated and, therefore, she has little idea how men think or act and therefore tends to marginalize...okay, well, Austen tended to marginalize, so let's call what Pascal does "straight-up half-pipe fancy-skateboard-move biffs" the male voice. For example, a furious, seemingly straight playwright, when faced with the stunning, everyone-wants-to-sex-her-because-she's-byoooooootiful-but-also-has-a-headache-tonight-honey Elizabeth, finds himself thinking "...why he had been so unfriendly to this beautiful girl. He made up his mind to make her his friend."
Here are some alternate and more believable ways that sentence could have ended:
"He made up his mind to make her his fuck buddy"
"He made up his mind to maker her his concubine"
"...his latest conquest."
"...his plus-one to a hot afterparty."
"...his next teammate on his co-ed dodgeball league."
"...his girlfriend, for crying out Pete."
It's an odd experience reading this thus far. For all I'm sassing, it's almost as though I'm too embarrassed for my young self to make fun of it, because it exposes what a naive dork with poor taste I was. Dave White recently wrote in a review of a tweeny movie, Prom, "because while it’s ostensibly about high school kids, it’s not for them. Instead, it’s a children’s film about how cool it’s going to be when they get to be big and can drive a car and stay up late and go out to a huge party." And that is exactly how I imagine Sweet Valley High would read now. At the tender age of 34, that's certainly how this version of the late 20s is reading...only worse, it's like a kid's idea and execution of a nighttime soap opera like 90210: The Original: big showy fights with awkward transitions and poor use of vocabulary; lots of talk about sex but very little actual sex; the very serious use of the term "soulmate" and "beloved"; a half-baked presentation of "living an artist's life"; everyone has glamorous jobs that all could be the topic of "When I Grow Up, I Wanna Be..." homework.
But who am I kidding? My desire to make fun of all these things, and to find out if Lila Fowler and Ken Matthews really do get divorced, will win out.
Also: I really want to read another poorly executed sex scene like Jessica and Todd's one blazing night of passion, their "mouths furiously pressing, kissing, sucking, inhaling each other" as they "make love with an otherworldly passion."
Which is exactly what 10-year-old Jessie would say, come to think of it. Minus the "poorly executed" adverb-verb combo.
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