Scholars, sisters, and talented shoppers
The Brontë Project: A Novel of Passion, Desire, and Good PR
By Jennifer Vandever
Shaye Areheart, 279 pp., $21
The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives
By Sarah Strohmeyer
Dutton, 347 pp., $23.95
She, Myself and I
By Whitney Gaskell
Bantam, 384 pp., $12
October brings three well-executed comic novels of varying degrees of sophistication, from brilliant to brain candy.
Jennifer Vandever sends up academia, celebrity, Hollywood, and romance in ''The Brontë Project: A Novel of Passion, Desire, and Good PR," a first novel that is fresh, playful, intelligent, and consistently entertaining.
Sara Frost, a shy young scholar at an unnamed university in Manhattan, has dedicated her career to a fruitless search for Charlotte Brontë's missing letters. Her relationship of six years with Paul, a Laurence Olivier look-alike who researches ''sexy topics like language and power," is on the brink of marriage. Sara knows that Brontë studies lack career-enhancing sexiness, a fact brought home with a vengeance by the arrival on campus of flamboyant Claire Vigee, the university's visiting Princess Diana scholar. Claire, red-haired and gorgeous, is a best-selling author who will say or do anything to attract media attention. She turns up at an English-department reception dressed ''like a cross between Rita Hayworth and a seventeenth-century courtesan," flanked by two leather-clad bodyguards and trailed by an assistant who thinks the Brontë sisters were a Motown group.
At troublemaking Claire's instigation, Paul decides not to marry Sara (''the silent Victorian," Claire calls her) and accepts a fellowship in Paris. Stunned and disillusioned by his rejection, Sara contemplates the shortcomings of the 19th-century romantic novel vis-à-vis the reality of modern love. Her life begins to take turns that would have been unthinkable before Paul dumped her. She appears on a panel with Claire to discuss the parallels between Princess Diana's life and Charlotte Brontë's. She has a fling with Denis, an amoral Frenchman who may be Claire's half brother or her lover, or both. She befriends Mr. Burke and Mr. Ives, wealthy eccentrics who try to live entirely in the 19th century, by candlelight, with no central heating. She begins an affair with Byrne Emmons, a recovering drug addict and Hollywood producer who thinks Charlotte Brontë's short, sad life has the makings of a blockbuster ''feel good" movie, if he can sign a big enough star. ''The Brontë Project" is a satire and a story of self-discovery, as naïve, romantic Sara learns to face reality.
Sarah Strohmeyer leaves working-class Lehigh, Pa., scene of her popular Bubbles Yablonsky hairdresser-turned-reporter mystery series, and enters ''Desperate Housewives" territory in her satire of the leisure class, ''The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives." The women of Hunting Hills, a posh suburb of Cleveland, are rich, thin, and perfectly groomed, and abide by their own rules (''Number 5: Remember that the more you buy, the more your husband values you"). Some of these housewives are desperate; most are merely bored, shallow, snobbish, actually or potentially adulterous, and unimaginative, except when it comes to spending money, which they do with creative abandon. Investigative reporter Claire Stark, newly married to venture capitalist John Harding, hitherto the town's most sought-after divorced man, steps into this rarefied jungle of man-eating cats and is promptly mauled.
Red-haired, rangy Claire is a poor fit in Hunting Hills, where women spend their days dieting, working out, popping amphetamines, being styled and manicured, gossiping, and shopping. Claire's impoverished West Virginia childhood and her years as a hard-working journalist haven't prepared her for the cut-throat country-club life. She's clueless about fashion, grooming, home decorating, party planning, and all the other skills crucial to maintaining the Hunting Hills social order. Neighbor Marti Denton takes Claire under her wing and begins schooling her in the basics, all the while gathering information that might serve to break up Claire's marriage. Marti is miserably married to a pudgy, philandering stockbroker, and she thinks she has a chance with John if only he'll ditch ''the red-haired
As Claire tries to adjust to life among the rich and idle, she begins to see that all is not perfect in Hunting Hills, that there are scandals brewing that involve embezzlement, blackmail, extortion, orgies, Viagra abuse, and lesbian bashing. Claire uses her investigative skills to uncover the town's unsavory secrets, putting her marriage at risk in the process. Strohmeyer has a keen eye when it comes to class distinctions, social posturing, status symbols, and the minutiae of self-maintenance at the top of the consumer chain. She uses her observations to sharp comic effect.
Whitney Gaskell's ''She, Myself and I" is better-than-average sister lit, a lightweight, predictable, but engagingly written story of three sisters, their relationships with one another, and their romantic entanglements. Each of the sisters narrates her own story in a separate segment. While events overlap, each voice is distinct. Paige, the eldest Cassel sister, is a divorce attorney recovering from a marriage that ended when her husband came out of the closet. Sophie, the middle sister, is about to be a first-time mother and is in the grip of hormonal surges that make her doubt everything, from her kitchen cabinets to her marriage, and lust after every attractive man she sees. Youngest sister Mickey abandons her plan to attend medical school and returns home, where she takes a job in a restaurant kitchen and launches an affair with a charismatic, and married, chef. ''She, Myself and I" has some funny bits, most involving the outspoken, off-kilter Sophie, whose adjustment to motherhood is far from smooth. Her account of a visit to a nonsupportive ''support" group for new mothers is a gem.
Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.
