B
Title: Ex & The Single Girl
Author: Lani Diane Rich
Publication Info: 5-Spot/Time-Warner 2005
ISBN: 0446693073
Genre: Chick Lit
This book isn’t published yet and I want to be able to review it in a manner that describes it well without giving away all the good bits, because reviewing a book that was published six years ago, like some of my earlier pieces here, is way different than reviewing a book that technically hasn’t been born to the market yet.
I will tell you that the ending made me cry on the bus, and as I’ve said before, nothing alarms people more than a pregnant lady crying. So I had to put my coat over my head and pretend I was sleeping. Let the record state: I was reduced to huddling under my red coat as the defensive line of hormones rushed the quarterback of my emotional control and knocked him on his ass.
Ex & The Single Girl is the story of Portia and the Miz Fallons, a family of three generations of women, all unmarried. Portia is in Syracuse working on her PhD when she is called home by her dramatic mother, Mags, who says she is suffering from back pain. Mags wants Portia back home for the summer to run the family bookstore in Truly, Georgia, with her aunt Vera and grandmother Bev. There is never a mention of familial titles. Vera is never “Aunt Vera.” She’s simply “Vera.” Same with Mags. Not “Mom.” Mags.
Portia drives the long distance down to Georgia and arrives to find her mother in the picture of health and her aunt, mother, and grandmother exchanging weighty glances with one another, conducting a wordless conversation beneath the audible one at every moment.
Not only is her mother healthy and not at all requiring assistance, but they’ve arranged an affair for her to help her get over her failed relationship. Peter, her live-in boyfriend of two years plus, left her suddenly – on Valentine’s Day – by moving out with no warning. And writing a “Dear Portia” note. On the title page. Of his newly-published novel. And leaving it open on the bed. With an Itty-Bitty Booklight holding open the page.
Yeah. Whatta man.
The unmarried (and rumored-to-be unmarriable) Miz Fallons have a specific manner of getting themselves back to happiness: a Flyer. A Flyer is their term for a one night stand (or short-term relationship) that they have no intention of making permanent. And Mags, Vera, and Bev have picked out a Flyer for Portia: visiting writer Ian Beckett – a sexy, handsome Brit renting a neighboring farm while he finishes his book.
For a girl with a Pride and Prejudice fetish so wide she’s reexamining Austen for her dissertation, the sexy British writer man is almost too much to resist. So Portia ends up sliding into the situation, unwilling but curious despite herself, and, during the course of her visit home, evaluates her own attitude toward romance and happily ever after, while revealing several painful longstanding family mysteries.
The core theme of the story focuses on how she learns how to change that attitude. Instead of Pride & Prejudice, we have Attitude and Expectations. Portia has to learn that there’s really no such thing as a one sided situation in a relationship, that nothing is truly one party’s fault. From the smaller, more immediately questions, (Was Peter responsible for their breakup? Was she? ) to the larger issues working back generations in her family, Portia has to find the balance between anger and assuming responsibility, and decide whether to change her own assumptions of how life will proceed, even if no one else around her wants to undertake a similar adjustment.
Ex & The Single Girl is told in an incredibly visual style, which is interesting because it is a first-person narrated story. However, I will spank my own ass if there’s not some talk of optioning for tv or movie production because the narrative itself urges the reader to imagine so much visually that turning it into a script or screenplay would seem like a facile transition.
For one thing, unless there is a section I missed, there’s no concrete description of Portia – which isn’t unusal for a first person narrative. Unless you have the unrealistic moment of the character saying, ‘My brown hair refused to blah blah hair clip mirror blah,’ you don’t have an easy way to determine what a first-person narrator actually looks like. But the reader does see Portia seeing herself in a window reflection and you know she’s got Cheetoh dust smearing all over her wineglass and her hair is staging a protest in all directions, and she’s wearing the official post-breakup uniform of an old flannel bathrobe – but you don’t ever get a moment of description that tells you what she looks like.
So here’s this visual style of writing that lets the picture play out in your brain, but no description of heroine? Fat? Thin? There was no description of her, so the reader can pin not a single assumption of her character’s issues on basic body types. The reader is free to imagine her in whatever manner. And while that left me a bit at sea when trying to type Portia, it also let me relate to her more easily without assumptions based on image. (And for the record, I never thought Portia looked like overbite girl on the cover. No chance.)
The romance of the story between Portia and Ian is involving as it builds slowly, and is reflected in the various romantic relationships surrounding them, from her aunt, her mother, her best friend, and even her long-absent father.
Ian himself was adorably easy to picture, and Rich managed the balance of creating a character who was both a much more attractive, attentive option to the ex, Peter, but who was also intriguing and not so much a sure thing at every moment. He was clearly the intended hero, but there were times I wasn’t so sure of him and of Portia. He had his own mysteries, and avoided the trap of being that perfect paragon of unrealistic hero-dom who exists solely to support and assist the heroine’s growth (I call this the “Jack Phenomenon,” a la Jack in Titanic).
My disappointment with the book was the setting and the unlikely compactness of the cast of characters in light of that setting. Granted, this is not an epic novel that closely follows several generations, but to set a story in a small town in Georgia would imply a larger group of people with whom the heroine is very familiar, because a small town, once you walk back into it, encloses you with everyone and everything familiar. To reduce the cast of the story to Portia, her three relatives, her best friend, and the partners and romantic interests of those women seems to cheat the setting. Further, the South is itself a personality and a character, and while the characters themselves are well acquainted with Southern charm, hospitality, and indomitable strength, there wasn’t a great deal about the town of Truly to make it clear that it was, indeed, in Georgia.
However, the issues of family, history, and whether you make your own future or whether that future is half-decided by that family and history, make for a charming read. By far the most intelligent and clever element was the recurring theme of “flying:” it’s intriguing and sets the book apart from other predictable contemporary romances. Aside from serving as a euphamism for a casual and satisfying affair with no dangerous long-term attachments or expectations, it’s also a way of questioning what Portia is truly doing throughout the story. Is she flying away from her problems, or flying home? Is she letting those she loves fly away, to see if they return to her of their own volition? Did Peter fly away from her to test her or to test himself? Can she let someone she loves fly away without telling them how they feel, to test their own devotion without taking a risk?
Rich’s skill as a writer is that wonderful balance, from the balance of her characters’ issues and likeability to the balance of the plot threads. This is a book that manages to be a fun read while also exploring visceral concepts of vulnerability, so that by the time I reached the ending, I was invested enough in the character’s happiness to cry and smile over the ending.
My disappointment with the book was the setting and the unlikely compactness of the cast of characters in light of that setting. Granted, this is not an epic novel that closely follows several generations, but to set a story in a small town in Georgia would imply a larger group of people with whom the heroine is very familiar, because a small town, once you walk back into it, encloses you with everyone and everything familiar. To reduce the cast of the story to Portia, her three relatives, her best friend, and the partners and romantic interests of those women seems to cheat the setting. Further, the South is itself a personality and a character, and while the characters themselves are well acquainted with Southern charm, hospitality, and indomitable strength, there wasn’t a great deal about the town of Truly to make it clear that it was, indeed, in Georgia.
Sarah, this is a stereotype. I got divorced, and over x-mas break from my PhD program at a northern school (well, Kentucky, north to me), I retreated to my mom’s house where I grew up in a small town in Alabama. Besides my parents, I did not see a soul I knew until I ventured out to Wal-Mart and ran into my boyfriend from high school, whom I proceeded to date for a year and a half, marry, and have a child with. Wait, that sounds like a stereotype.
Seriously, now that you post this, I am thinking back over the YA romance I’m about to finish. I know the small town Alabama setting is authentic, because I lived it. But I wonder if you are going to tell me I am cheating the setting because I don’t have the heroine wandering around the court square, stumbling into pillars of indomitable strength.
Maybe the small town Southern setting has become such a genre unto itself that readers feel cheated if a writer doesn’t include the expected (and, indeed, hoped-for) markers: the tea party, the cotillion, the uncle on a Civil War reinactment battlefield. And maybe this genre is such a scary monster (tho she be planted with azaleas) that she insists novels of ALL subgenres conform. Granted, this is not an epic novel that closely follows several generations, but that’s what you want, because you saw peaches.
I am very interested in your response and others’ viewpoints on this. Because I live here, it’s hard for me to view my settings objectively (Vicki says they are okay—*shrug*).
You still get big gooey chocolate brownie points from me for being pregnant and yet retaining the capacity to move and think hard.
Debutantes? Town square? Reenactments of the War of Northern Aggression? Heaven forbid!
I don’t mean the stereotypical elements of Southern culture at all. Certainly you are right that the Southern small town setting has become a genre unto itself (and it has recently, though I wonder why the South specifically became linked so closely with stories about rediscovering the true elements of oneself).
What I meant in discussing the setting was that there didn’t seem to be anything that made this town particularly Southern – and I don’t mean hoop skirts, pillars of female strength, and mint juleps. I meant that the small town vibe I felt in the story didn’t necessarily have to be the South. It could have been a small town in Pennsylvania.
Hubby and I are now arguing, both of us having lived in South Carolina at different times for a number of years, about the differences between small town culture in the South, and in other parts of the country. The South is different, but it’s not the stereotypical elements that make it so. I’m going to have to ponder further the specific things I missed, or thought should have been there, but I want to be clear – I didn’t expect tipsy reminiscences of the
cotillion and white gloved tea parties.
And wait, gooey chocolate brownie points? Mmmmm. I think I’m making a tray of brownies today, then. Baby is due tomorrow and dang it, the time in which I can eat whatever I want is coming to an end!
I think the whole idea of small towns in general is outdated. People leave small towns now. They do not stay. The most popular girl in town is looking to move up to, at least, the big town down the highway. She ain’t gonna marry Mr. Quarterback and move into her daddy’s old house. Your circle of old friends is LONG GONE once you drag your sorry butt back to town.
Also, and this is coming straight from my ass, everyone has satellite tv and cellphones, and other people’s lives just aren’t as immediately fascinating as they used to be. Thirty years ago the most dramatic thing around at 9 pm every night may very well have been your neighbor’s slutty teenage daughter sneaking out with no bra. Or certainly the prodigal divorced daughter returning with her tail between her legs. But that’s got nothing on I Married a Midget Millionaire, you know? Times, they are a’changing.
In all honesty, however, I HATE the epic novel. I hate an endless cast of quirky Southern characters being dragged out to shape the story. *shudder* It just doesn’t do it for me. It usually results in me yelling at the book, “Who the fuck is Marybelle again? God damn it, can we put away the sweet tea and get back to the internal conflict, puh-lease?”
And Sarah. . . I’m positively vibrating with excitement and burning nausea for you! Make the brownies. For sure.
Good luck to you, darlin’!!!! Don’t worry if you poop on the delivery table. They say it happens all the time. (Don’t ask me why I was so worried about this. I must have asked the nurses five times. Some sort of nervous tic.) Oh, and try not to get the old army nurse who got called in on her day off. I. Am. Seriuos.
Army nurse?! ARMY NURSE? AAAAGH.
And seriously, I’m not too worried about pooping on the delivery table. And Hubby is enough of a 12 year old to have confessed that he hopes I do anyway because it would be funny.
And Hubby is enough of a 12 year old to have confessed that he hopes I do anyway because it would be funny.
OMG, he looks just like you, Sweetie!!!
Yes, I got the old, off-duty army nurse.
Me: “I’d really like to try to do this natural. If I could be up and walking around instead of laying down, strapped to a monitor. . . That would be great.”
Nurse: “Sure.”
Five minutes later. . . “Okay, up on the bed. I need to get this monitor on.”
I should have kicked her bitch-ass out. Learn from my mistakes. Kick some ass. Being in labor is the perfect excuse anyway.
Sorry. Waaaay off topic.
Vicki said:
Thirty years ago the most dramatic thing around at 9 pm every night may very well have been your neighbor’s slutty teenage daughter sneaking out with no bra. Or certainly the prodigal divorced daughter returning with her tail between her legs
A lot of this sounds like Hope Floats, which I did not recall as a Southern movie. But I looked it up on http://www.imdb.com Texas.. I reckon that counts. (A fascinating study has been done on how people in different parts of the country view regions. For instance, Northerners think Texas and Kentucky are in the South, but Southerners think Texas is West and Kentucky is Midwest or North. No one claims Florida.)
SB Sarah said:
I meant that the small town vibe I felt in the story didn’t necessarily have to be the South. It could have been a small town in Pennsylvania….Hubby and I are now arguing, both of us having lived in South Carolina at different times for a number of years, about the differences between small town culture in the South, and in other parts of the country. The South is different, but it’s not the stereotypical elements that make it so.
Let me know when you figure it out, because if I am letting down readers, I would love to know ahead of time and fix it. I do not set out to write “Southern” novels; I set them in the South because this is where I have always lived, and if I set them in Idaho, I would have to do research.
Army nurse?! ARMY NURSE? AAAAGH
Here’s a quirky Southern character for ya. My dad retired recently, but he was an OB/GYN, and he liked to wander the halls of the hospital playing banjo for his patients while they were in labor. He is from Pennsylvania.
So I guess we won’t be hearing much from you after today. :down: Unless you can figure out how to nurse the baby and type at the same time. I never could do this. I watched a whooooole lotta COPS. Baby liked COPS.
Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha gonna doooo? Heh!
Don’t worry – I’ll still be around. I imagine much time hiding in my room with the wee one on SBTB to escape. 🙂
There’s certainly a difference between setting your novels in the South and writing the “Southern novel.” I think that genre might have gone the way of Eudora Welty, now that I think about it, though it’s been awhile since I looked up contemporary Southern writers. I imagine someone will have a lot to say about that idea- is the Southern novel dead?
My poorly-described (sorry!) minor issue with Ex & the Single Girl‘s setting was not that it missed my checklist of what makes a setting appropriately Southern. It was more of a feeling of, “Huh. Why the South? Why was this novel set in Georgia?” Dead or not, the Southern-set novel is a powerful genre of both contemporary fiction and more-established literary fiction, mostly because of the setting. So while not having a clear idea of what Portia looked like, for example, was a positive in that it let me imagine her in any way I liked, not having a clear idea of what made Truly such a powerful force in Portia’s life left me confused, because I couldn’t discern what was so powerful about it that she went north as far as possible for her schooling to escape the place and the people in it. It had power, the setting, but I was never sure what it was.
not having a clear idea of what made Truly such a powerful force in Portia’s life left me confused, because I couldn’t discern what was so powerful about it that she went north as far as possible for her schooling to escape the place and the people in it.
Now that’s a GREAT way of saying it. Especially for a woman with a homonally shrunken brain. I understand completely.
Right. Quentin Compson. Evoke him and you have to follow through. I get it.
Maybe it’s been done so much that some of us think you can write it in shorthand. And you’re saying nu-uh, I want you to write it out.
>I watched a whooooole lotta COPS.<
I listened to a lot of Ani DiFranco and stared out the window. I suspect that I had a bit of The Depression after the second child. They say it gets more obvious with each birth. I decided to play it safe and not have a third. Oh, and did not homeschool the first two so as not to tempt God to tell me to kill them. *shrug* Whatever works.
It’s also hard to discuss as a Yankee, even with a familiarity with the South, because there’s a lot of, “Well, it’s different in the South but it’s not the mint juleps. No one walks around in Confederate uniform unless the Citadel is hosting a formal dance and they have to wear their dress greys. It’s different… just trust me on that!”
I am glad you called me on the vagueness – I never thought that what I was saying about setting might be mistaken for wishing for the stereotypical elements, but you are right that I wasn’t specific enough in what I said. Good thing this is a review blog with comments so I can force the hormones to step aside and allow for continued synaptic function.
Seriously, the other day? I had to think of how I spell my first name. I got as far as “S…a… wait a minute.”
If I may jump in about the south, having never left California…
(Also, I must say that I am not as well read as all you smart ladies)
I don’t think the southern novel is dead. In the past few years I’ve read the YaYa Sisterhood novels, the Big Stone Gap novels, the Secret Life of Bees, and these are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. (I don’t know if most of these count as Literature with a capital L, though)
I love southern gothic, for years I wanted to live in the south because of it. And again, I am not well read, so if I know what SB Sarah is talking about, then the southern novel can’t be dead.
Wait…pooping on the delivery table!?!?!? Oh my lord, I can never have children.
Good luck, Sarah! (On the birth, not the pooping.)
Bloody hellfire. They never write about poo in those books where the heroine gives birth in a lift, or an isolated log cabin, or a car in a snowstorm, nobly assisted by the cowboy hero whose frozen heart is thawed by the innocent touch of a tiny hand. Or afterbirth.
Anyhow, hope you’re all packed up and ready to drive through some really desolate mountain roads in a poorly-equipped hatchback while escaping a dastardly serial killer, Sarah. I believe it’s traditional. I’d bring your great-gramma’s biscuit recipe if I were you. And a spare pair of bootees – it’s probably twins.
EvilAuntiePeril, you kill me!
Yeah, Sarah, be sure to whip up some biscuits before the pains start gettin’ too close. You’ll want them to be good and golden when you rise from your birthin’ bed to serve the dinner vittles. Ladling out stew is the best way to get the afterbirth to drop.
And, EvilAuntie, the image of the laboring heroine, stuck in a tiny cabin in a snowstorm, with only the brave hero to help. . . then she poops right into his outstretched hands. . . Now THAT’S a foundation for love.
As soon as I finished this, I came here to check out Sarah’s review, and I completely agree with her grade, but for slightly different reasons.
I already accept that I tend to dislike quaint Southern town concepts (can’t get Steel Magnolias out of my head), so I really tried to neutralize myself over that one. Instead what I think kept this book from A status for me was a certain distance I felt between myself (via the author’s prose) and the characters/relationships/conflicts. It was as if I was standing back *watching* everything happen (Sarah’s comments about the visual nature of the book and the lack of physical descriptors for nearly every character are so apt), rather than feeling dug into what was going on. The prose was competent, even elegant at times; the emotional conflicts witin Portia were nicely done and more interesting than what’s in a lot of chick lit and romantic fiction these days, IMO; and not everyone got their HEA, which was downright refreshing. But throughout the whole book I felt emotionally removed, even though I didn’t want to be.
First of all, my one nitpicky point: the amount of research one has to do to be at the writing stage of a dissertation does NOT make a change of topic an easy or quick decision. In many, if not most cases, it’s academic hari-kari. Seriously. And this is coming from someone who screwed around for two years with only 2 chapters done. I understand that sense of ambivalence in a big way.
I really felt that Portia got over a least a decade of mixed feelings toward her mother awfully quickly. I very much enjoyed the complexity of that relationship and the way Rich handled Mags’s own relationship failures, but preecisely because it was so complicated, I felt it should have taken Portia a little more time to unwind all that and unwind from all that. I got that Rich was allowing Portia to heal through a new understanding of her mother, but all those years she missed out on her dad . . . whew, lots of stuff there to work out, IMO.
Now, as to Portia and Peter, Portia and Ian. I loved the way Rich handled the Peter situation; oh what a way to turn the emotional tables back and forth. I think she took some risks there with those two that really paid off. Great, great, great handling of a secondary relationship, IMO. Also loved the Beauji friendship, while I’m thinking about secondary relationships in the book—not only a good device, but a realistically portrayed friendship, IMO.
As for Ian, though, while I liked a lot of what Rich did with his character, I did not feel the passion there with those two, even though Rich walked me through a number of the emotional steps. While I enjoyed the couple of scenes where Ian’s famous composure begins to slip, I didn’t feel that Rich really played out his own insecurities and nuances in a way that took him past the attractive but rather typical Romance hero type. I kept feeling that he needed to be more concerned about Portia’s emotional instability early on, and that many of the early scenes between them placed him in almost a daddy role (male comforter, male self-esteem builder). So I loved knowing he wasn’t perfect himself, but part of me wasn’t so understanding of what he saw in the emotional mess that was Portia early on. And as the relationship progressed, I just didn’t feel the emotional and sexual urgency that was supposedly between them. It was like intellectually I knew they would be a couple, and I could piece together the reasons, that is, all the things they *probably* saw in each other and the unconscious reasons they *probably* were drawn to one another, but I never FELT it or was moved by it all. So I didn’t cry at the end, because I actually felt that Portia had more onscreeen chemistry with Peter, even though he wasn’t THE ONE.
So I did really enjoy reading this book, and I will definitely try another of Rich’s books, but I wish I had been more emotionally invested in it. I have been wondering lately, though, whether the somewhat shorter page counts of a number of these chick lit novels makes it difficult to achieve the kind of emotional depth I’d like to see in books about contemporary women struggling through their own complicated lives. And maybe most readers aren’t really looking for the emotional mess, just the laughs and the feel good ending and the sense of triumph for the heroine.