Did we meet in Capri?

The Overnight Socialite  - Bridie Clark (Weinstein Books, 2009)

So, the rain in Spain now falls mainly on the isle of Capri. Or something like that. The novel is billed as a modern retelling of Pygmalion, but it's really far more My Fair Lady, up to and including the moment where I expect our good Pygmalion to dance Eliza around the room.

Lucy is a wannabe designer from the heartland, and Wyatt is the best of Old Money New York as well as a promising anthropologist who never bothered to have a career. So when he breaks up with his It Girl girlfriend, he claims he can train anyone to be a blue blood socialite... and he'll write a book about the process. Lucy just happens to be nearby when he hits on this plan, and besides, she could use the connections to make inroads with the fashion industry.

And the plot is pretty obvious from there, but with some nice minor character plots as well. It's fun to get to know Wyatt's mom, and the "will he propose or won't he?" drama between Wyatt's best friend and his longtime girlfriend is probably the most interesting relationship question of the entire novel. Plus you get a whole bunch of aspirational brand name-dropping, even though the book is set against the collapse of the financial industry. All the chick lit Ts crossed and Is dotted.

And while we are adapting GB Shaw, can I get Arms and the Man?

Snakes and snails....

This Boy's Life: Tobias Wolff (Harper & Row, 1989)

In short: a memoir of a kid growing up in the school of hard knocks during the 1950s and 60s. Tobias and his mom move around a lot, as she tries to get away from an abusive boyfriend and eventually form a new family. (Meanwhile his dad and brother are living among the wealthy on the East Coast, although heaven knows we get enough hints that this situation isn't without its perils.)

Toby becomes Jack, and dreams big dreams, but along the way he is a liar, a thief, a truant, and a general hoodlum. Possibly nothing really outside the ordinary boundaries of being a working-class boy at the time, but it was hard for this girl reader to identify.

Also, I was completely distracted by marginalia. This copy previously belonged to someone who read the book for school - guessing high school. And she had plenty to say about the book. She was very troubled by the men in the story (with good enough reason, I'll admit) and had plenty of smiley faces for the mom. Marginalia tells you so much about a reader and the times in which that reader lives and ... well, anyway, it was fun.

The best part of the book (for me) came at the very end, with this line:

When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever.

This quote struck such a chord for me. My teenage reader, on the other hand, let it slide by unremarked.

Runaway Bride!

The Great Escape - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (William Morrow, 2012)

Instead of a fake marriage, we have a wedding that aborts just before takeoff. And if this sounds familiar, it may be in part because it's the other half of Phillips' last novel. There, the runaway bride's best friend finds herself stranded with the just-too-perfect groom. Here, we ditch Texas for the Great Lakes, where the bride ends up after a stint on the back of a motorcycle. (This, btw, is not the first time this scenario has played out in a Phillips' novel.)

Did we mention the bride is the daughter of the former president, and thus this non-wedding is a huge scandal?

Lucy didn't get to sow any wild oats during her teen years. So she's going to do that now. With a reluctant biker named Panda, and some hair dye, and fake tattoos, and whatever else it takes. The love story plays out more or less the way you'd expect. But the B and C plots are delightful. Lucy picks up some girlfriends along the way, and an orphaned boy, and there are some nice lessons learned about resilience, vulnerability, and the ways in which communities can provide for one another. Pretty charming.

(Why did I never set up an "absurd but adorable marriage plot" tag for my blog?)

Inside magical thinking

An Invisible Sign of My Own - Aimee Bender (Doubleday, 2000)

For me, Bender's novel was alternately a zoomingly fast read, and almost unreadable. This world was too terrifying to me, perhaps because of how much I recognized it. Mona is 20, and an elementary school math teacher. Set the unlikeliness of this aside. Because there's plenty more weird where that came from.

She's fixated on numbers, and their significance. She has help in this from her high school math teacher neighbor turned hardware store owner. He wears numbers around his neck corresponding to his mood - often very low. She sees numbers appear in people's yards, that just happen to herald the age of a resident within who is about to die. When these show up again in the novel, the dread I felt as I waited for Bender to prove the causality untrue was unbearable. I recognize these superstitions, these intuited "meanings," these compulsions. Because I haven't even told you about all the compulsions.

I finished the book a week ago, and have been playing around with some of the themes in my head ever since. They aren't easy. We find clues and significance in coincidence. We believe we have the power to shape outcomes with our thoughts and actions. We believe that if we shout our fears and stay fixated on them, they cannot come to pass. (Or, that at the very least we will court the faceoff and get it over with.) We bind things that make us feel good and connected with things that make us feel sick and alone.

Or do we? I found the actions of the characters to be (generally) exaggerated versions of the ways our own neuroses manifest. But does spotlighting these thoughts and behaviors diminish their power, or merely feed it. I'm still not sure.