Plus One
Hardcover, 303 pg.
Prospect Park Books, 2014
Read: February 10 – 11, 2015
From The Next Best Thing to Landline to Funny Girl to this, I think I might have reached my limit about fictional TV writers. Sadly, this was the wrong one to go out on.
You could, I think, make the case that most of this book reads like the prequel to Landline from the husband’s perspective — and in many ways you’d be right, but still, you shouldn’t do that.* This is the story of Alex Sherman-Zicklin, the husband (and Plus One) of Figgie. Figgie had been wife, mother and struggling TV writer, who is now an Emmy-award show runner of a multi-Emmy-winning cable comedy. Which means all of the sudden, she’s the bread winner (winning far more bread than he ever did), so he quits the job he’s not happy about to be a “domestic first responder.”
He quickly becomes bored, gets a creepy-friend (also a Plus One), falls in lust with a butcher/food blogger, ignores his kids, and does several other deceptive, marriage-damaging things covering the range from pathetic to devious to potentially criminal. Which coincided with Figgy taking up with trust-destroying antics of her own. If this selfish loser had just talked to his wife about what was going on, almost everything that happened could’ve been avoided. Not that self-involved Figgy was much better, really — I don’t see what either of them saw in the other.
Alex, his Plus One pal (whose name I’ve already forgotten), and (to an extent) the butcher are characters — everyone else is pretty much a plot device or place holder. Even Figgy is more of a presence, maybe an obstacle, than a character.
Somewhere in there I was supposed to laugh, I’m sure, but I didn’t manage more than an almost-grin.
The last chapter, maybe two, saved this one for me and turned it from a book I really didn’t like to a book I don’t mind too much. It’s still not a book I’d recommend, just one I have no antipathy for.
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* That’s two books in as many months that I’ve compared to Landline — just when did this become the standard by which I judge all fiction?
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