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Babette Bliss, the decidedly modern heroine of this comical novel, suffers from an unsettling problem: ambivalence. She has taken leave from her job with an avant-garde New York theater to face her dilemmas concerning her marriage, career, and soul. Should she forgive her philandering husband, George Harrison, an Iowa-raised corporate lawyer with an uncanny resemblance to Babette’s favorite Beatle? Is it time, in fact, for her and George to have a baby? Or should she have an affair? She is thrown into even deeper confusion when Shara-Rose, her leather-clad therapist, decides to give up her practice and become a rock star.
No matter where Babette looks, abandonment is everywhere. So can she really desert her theater, at a time when the company is faced with eviction? To sort things out, she decides to live by herself again—only to team up with an unexpected roommate.
Filled with subtle irony and insight, Urban Bliss is a humorous and touching novel that takes up old-age problems and sheds a contemporary light on them.
Janice Eidus, winner of two O. Henry Prizes, is the author of a novel, Faithful Rebecca, and the short story collections Vito Loves Geraldine and The Celibacy Club. She lives in New York City.
When avant-garde Manhattan theater director Babette Bliss, ``a hot-blooded, uninhibited, aggressive Jewish girl from the Bronx,'' learns that her husband, George, a corporate lawyer, has just had an affair with blonde fellow attorney Nicole Burden, she walks out, refusing to speak to him despite his prostrate pleas to reconcile. Babette's rage, vengeful impulses and hurt and confusion, as well as her ambivalent urge to become a mother at age 35, are sensitively explored in this wholly engaging tale. Eidus, a novelist ( Faithful Rebecca ) and short-story writer ( Vito Loves Geraldine ), creates memorable comic characters throughout. Babette's spouse, George Harrison, looks like his ex-Beatle namesake and tries to woo Babette back with Beatles tunes. Shara-Rose, her blunt, leather-clad psychotherapist, is lead singer in the rock band Mild Neurosis. And Babette's new roommate, playwright Carlos Carlos (a Connecticut-born WASP who assumed a Latino name to rebel against his minister father) tries to lure her into bed by asking her to collaborate on his new play, Hard-Boiled Women , about a tough, assertive female detective. Narrated by Babette in clean-cut, present-tense prose, this is a ruefully funny, wickedly observant take on urban angst. (June)
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
Jeffrey Stieglitz
reviewed Urban Bliss on November 10, 2016
Urban Bliss
Unfunny, irritating characters, and dull, this book reminds me of the awful prose twenty year old kids (who'd never read a book before) brought to a first year creative writing class. I literally skimmed the last two chapters, because I could no longer pretend to care. The book feels like something has got to happen eventually at some point, and nothing ever does. The dialogue is leaden, the conflict is nonexistent, and it is all more or less resolved by the main character simply changing her mind. (That's not a spoiler. There is nothing here to spoil. It was rotten before I got here.) Idiotic touches meant to be drole (characters named Carlos Carlos, Jay Adroit, etc) are just goofy and add up to nothing.
It feels like this book is supposed to be a satire of a particular type of New Yorker. Babette, who works for an arts theatre group is taking the entire summer off to find herself. (Must be nice to afford that.) She discovers her lawyer husband was having an affair and leaves him. (No money worries, for some reason.) The husband looks a lot like George Harrison, The Beatle. His name is actually George. The Beatle has always been Babette's fantasy man. This is somehow significant but isn't, just like everything in this book. Babette is in therapy and she eats lots of ice cream to bury her feelings. Her therapist is eccentric and smokes a lot, but is also in a rock band. The theatre group is in danger of being kicked out of their building by ACME Developers. And...
Oh, who could care less? It's like a bad romance novel with no sex in it. Men keeping hitting on Babette and she dutifully (why?) avoids banging them. Our heroine is a self-involved twit, and everyone around her tolerates her stupidity. It's the sort of book where you wish halfway through that all the characters died in a bus accident, and the remainder of the book was blank pages, so you wouldn't have to read them.
Avoid this book. If you find a copy in your travels, quietly burn it. Save others from this abomination. I cannot stress this enough: it is beyond terrible.
If I had to guess why this fails... Eidus is clearly writing about her own life, again, but she wants to disguise it as fiction. And hey, why not make it funny? The result is a kind of shrill, overly detailed, almost panicked book, where you can almost hear the author laughing nervously at her own jokes. Ugh. If only she just write nonfiction, instead of tarting up her life with unnecessary dross.
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