Short Takes
Florence of Arabia
By Christopher Buckley
Random House, 253 pp., $24.95
Having had his arch way with political correctness ("Thank You for Smoking") and presidential politics ("No Way to Treat a First Lady"), that irrepressible cut-up Christopher Buckley turns his attention in "Florence of Arabia" to what ought to be the mother lode of farcical raw material -- American foreign policy.
Florence Farfaletti may be a low-level State Department functionary, but she has lofty ambitions. Outraged when the wife of a Middle Eastern ambassador tries to defect and is instead shipped home to Wasabia for execution, Florence hatches a scheme to liberate the women of that benighted part of the world. Gathering a small and unlikely mission impossible team -- one PR man, one foreign service fussbudget, and a shopworn soldier of fortune -- plus backers of shadowy provenance, she establishes a base in the corrupt Persian Gulf capital Amo-Amas, where matters soon begin to go seriously awry.
And with the novel as well. The author's insouciant worldview notwithstanding, some things are just too inherently unamusing to yield to the sophomoric charm of a spy caper. Perhaps without meaning to, the glib Mr. Buckley creates some surprisingly real characters to man (or woman) his Wasabi insurrection, and what he puts them through in the name of satire is not very funny.
Donorboy
By Brendan Halpin
Villard, 224 pp., paperback, $12.95
Rosalind had two mommies. Now, thanks to a collision with a poultry truck, she has none, and is being raised instead by Sean, a 35-year-old bachelor whose active involvement as Ros's father began and ended 14 years ago when he agreed to be a sperm donor. Precocious enough to note the absurdity of a tragedy involving "foodstuffs," Ros is suffering all the same, and is taking out her anger against the world by making a trial of herself to her friends, her teachers, and the ad hoc parent she calls "donorboy."
A recently bereaved husband and formerly a Boston high school teacher, Brendan Halpin is particularly well placed to imagine Ros's emotional plight and to express it in a voice that is unmistakably that of a contemporary teenager. For this coming-of-age tale set in the era of sperm banks and same-sex marriage, Halpin goes back to the future, shaping "Donorboy" as an updated epistolary novel told largely via the e-mail and instant messages Sean and Ros send each other while living uncomfortably under the same roof. The story sacrifices some sharpness of focus as additional characters come online. But Ros in particular remains a touching, exasperating, and thoroughly believable presence throughout.
Unkempt
By Courtney Eldridge
Harcourt, 262 pp., $23
Before the advent of cellphones, any stranger engaged in animated conversation with the thin air was recognized as a person to be avoided. That old sensation of alarm mingled with morbid curiosity is aroused by the stories -- baroque monologues tinged with a hint of psychosis -- in this debut collection by the fiendishly talented Courtney Eldridge.
In the main, her solo-flying narrators chatter obsessively about themselves in order to avoid understanding themselves. The truth seeps out through the cracks, however, and we come to understand plenty. In one comic-neurotic monologue, a salesgirl explains elaborately why it isn't her fault that she got conned by a troublesome customer. In the darker, title story, an aging good-time gal with a resentful grown daughter doesn't know what she did that made her such a bad mother. "The Former World Record Holder Settles Down," at novella length the most fully inhabited of the stories, is the rueful lament of a former porn starlet who finds that marriage has ruined sex for her.
Read collectively, the stories tend to create a frenetic wall of sound. Taken individually, each piece is no less than arresting, and more than one ranks as a tour de force of quirky style and insight.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
