Landline

Normally I wouldn't read a book like Landline, by Rainbow Rowell, but a website I read somewhat regularly, Bookriot.com, chose it as its first group read, so I took a chance. I realized why I don't read books like these. Landline, to perhaps unnecessarily pigeon-hole it, is chick lit, and a particularly frothy example. In addition, it's a curiously retrograde when it comes to feminism.

Our heroine is Georgie McCool (the kind of name that sounds good when you think of it, but doesn't look good on the page) is a TV comedy writer. She and her longtime writing partner, Seth, have finally got a meeting about the project they've been working on since college. Problem--this means she'll have to pass on going to Omaha with her husband and kids for Christmas.

Now, I'm not married, but even I understand priorities. Georgie's husband, Neal, in what I suspect would be most couple's conversations, would say, "That's great! You're life's dream is about to come true! Don't worry about Christmas!" But Neal, who is a real pill through the whole book, gives her grief, and Georgie stays behind, feeling guilty.

Then Rowell introduces a supernatural element that turns the book into, I'm not quite sure what. Sci-fi? She uses her old rotary phone at her mother's house and when she calls Neal's parents in Omaha, she ends up talking to Neal in the past--1998, when they briefly separated before he proposed to her. She finds herself unable to understand this, and wondering if anything she'll say something that causes her marriage to not exist (and thus her two girls), like the fading photograph in Back to the Future.

I'm just not the audience for Landline. I didn't find anything about it authentic, most of all the relationship between Neal and Georgie. When they meet he's a cartoonist for the humor magazine she writes for, but he's not funny, and doesn't act like a cartoonist. He's good with the kids and a stay-at-home dad, but otherwise he's a drag. Seth, who it's easy to see is really in love with Georgie, is pretty much a cad. There are no admirable men in this book.

Georgie isn't so admirable herself. Not only does she put aside her career goals because of her husband's boorish behavior, she puts him first--when she questions the relationship, she wonders if she hasn't ruined his life, not for a moment wondering if he hasn't ruined hers.

Besides that, the book isn't very well written. It subsists mostly of dialogue, and when Rowell does write prose, she exhibits a fondness for parentheses. Consider this bizarre string of sentences: "(Kendrick was forty, only three years older than Georgie. Her mom met him when he came to clean their pathetic excuse for a pool.) (These things actually happen.) (In the Valley.)" Subplots, such as Georgie's sister coming out as gay while a pug has puppies in a clothes dryer are clumsy and uninteresting.

Landline is a dud, but it was easy to read, so it didn't bother me for long.