Book Review: I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson

I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson.  I think I love I Think I Love You!  

Sometimes in the midst of winter, after the long fall list of heavy-hitting literary books, it's nice to relax with a lighter book.  It's even nicer when the "lighter" book surprises you with an unlooked-for depth to keep the story lingering in your mind just a little longer.  I first read Pearson several years back when she published her debut novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, the story of a woman who tries, with intermittent success, to balance her high-profile, high-finance job with being a good mother and a good wife and a good person.  Since I was not a mother or in a high-profile position at the time, nor did I feel I was ever likely to be, it was an unusual choice for me, but Pearson is a smart writer with keen insight, giving a fresh take on a well-tread trope. 

So I was curious when Ann Kingman, my sales rep for Knopf, mailed me an ARC of I Think I Love You, asserting that I would love it.  Turns out she was right.  Whether in film or novel form, romantic comedies are a dime a dozen and not my usual fodder.  I think it's much harder to write smart-funny than it is to write smart-drama (there's only one When Harry Met Sally for every hundred Maid in Manhattans), and I don't like wasting my time with dumb, so I'm fortunate that I've got sales reps who know my taste and don't try to pass off second rate stuff to me. 

In this novel, Petra is your typical 1970s schoolgirl whose love for David Cassidy overshadows everything else in her life, and Bill is the poor sod paid to write all of the bogus copy for The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Their paths cross when two pivotal events, decades apart, draw them together.  What starts out on the surface to be simply another chronicle of mean girls and teen idol obsession in a 1970s village in South Wales turns out to be a surprisingly poignant and insightful novel about the agony of adolescence, the cult of celebrity, and the ways we become irrevocably changed by our youthful passions.

I realize now, as I'm going back to find the pages I dog-eared, that the passages I noted tend toward the un-funny, but they are pretty representative of the insights that Petra has about love and relationships.  

"It's so hard for a child to understand their parents' unhappiness. 

Mine, if I'd only known it, were infected with the virus of incompati-

bility.  Nobody died from it, but nobody lived either."  (85)

[Upon contemplating a telephone after attending her mother's funeral]

 "It's not always easy to recognize the significant moments of your

life as you're living them, but Petra realizes this is one of them.  To 

stand in that hall and to realize that neither of her parents will ever

answer the phone again...Death itself is too big to take in, she already

see that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small

instalments (sic) that can never be paid off." (195)

[On visiting her baby, born dangerously prematurely, in her incubator in hospital]

"As Petra found out, you learn a lot about yourself when you're so close

to that much vulnerability...that the unendurable is endurable, if you just 

take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes

ever with your precious child."

Interestingly, the cover on the finished book looks identical to the advance reading copy I read, with one major change: the publisher apparently decided to stop pretending they cared about a male audience for this book and changed the background from a bright yellow to a bright pink.  My yellow cover looks curiously like the paperback cover for Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (cf the image above [but imagine a canary-yellow instead of the Pepto-pink that is shown] with the image at left to see what I mean). Incidentally, I would think that fans of Nick Hornby would like this book, partly because of the music connection and partly because he also writes smart-funny pretty well. Now, though, the publisher has pretty much shot itself in the foot in terms of marketing to a male audience.  But fair enough.  Not a ton of men were going to read it anyway--mostly men like my husband, who enjoy reading books that one might call "relationship-y," like Nick Hornby, and mostly prefer women's writing over men's writing.  The people who will like it are those who enjoy the works of Hornby, Jill Mansell, Helen Fielding, and other authors who write coming-of-age, women's relationships, and smart-funny well.  

Books, Books, Books, & Books

I've suspected it for some time now but my recent reading confirms it: Nick Hornby is one of my favorite authors.  I've read a few of his novels, which I would recommend to just about anyone, but it's his collections of essays written for Believer magazine that have won my undying devotion.  I'll confess straightaway that I've never picked up an issue of the magazine to read; rather, these essays came to me already in book form.  The first collection that I read, The Polysyllabic Spree, I stumbled upon in my bookstore.  The price was right (it was second hand) and I had an upcoming trip to visit my family in Wisconsin and thus would need plane reading, so reader, I bought it.  Each essay begins with two lists--books he bought that month and books he read that month (a format which I might adopt from time to time in homage)--and then meanders through his book adventures, all the while making this reader laugh with his witty cultural observations and wry self-effacements.

The second installation of essays collected from Believer is even better.  Housekeeping vs. The Dirt is funnier than anything I've read in a long time.  Possibly even funnier than the Stephen Fry book I'm currently reading.  I've also enjoyed it more because this time around he's been buying and/or reading more of the books that I've bought and/or read and he's got periodic shout-outs to indie bookstores.  He's currently my book hero, even if the stuff I'm reading is woefully out of date (Feb 2005 through June/July 2006).  Here's an excerpt: "I bought A Complicated Kindness at the Powell's bookstore in the Portland, Oregon, airport, after several fervent recommendations by the Powell's staff who looked after me at my signing.  Did you know that you [Americans] have the best bookshops in the world?  I hope so.  Over here in England, the home of literature ha-ha, we have only chain bookstores, staffed by people who for the most part come across as though they'd rather be selling anything else anywhere else; meanwhile you have access to booksellers who would regard their failure to sell you novels about Mennonites as a cause of deep, personal shame.  Please spend every last penny you have on books from independent bookstores."

Nick Hornby, folks.  Go read him now.  If you don't have any pennies left in this economy to buy the book at your favorite indie bookstore, go get his books from the library.  Or you could just ask to borrow my collection.  

In other book news, I wonder if anybody else has paired up Cormac McCarthy with the tv show Northern Exposure to write a book review.  If not, then you heard it here first, y'all.  Jim Lynch's forthcoming book from Knopf, Border Songs, is the most bizarre love child of Cormac McCarthy's westerns and the quirky characters from Northern Exposure.  Honestly, I can think of no higher praise!  There's a hint of menace lying under the surface of nearly every page but that menace is perfectly counterbalanced by one Brandon Vanderkool, a behemoth of a man who has recently joined the Border Patrol but who would much rather stay at home with his dairy cows and make shadow sculptures of birds.  His bumbling, awkward ways, which once made him the object of local ridicule, have freakishly come together to make him the best damn BP man on duty.  Brandon is infinitely endearing in his happenstances, whether he's making a bust on a would-be terrorist or discovering a hidden tunnel used for transporting drugs across the border from Canada to the US.  Mr. Lynch has delivered a book that is both warm & wary.  His sense of the ridiculous is tempered by the generosity he shows his characters, and I look forward to reading more from him.  The readers at The Odyssey Bookshop liked the book so much that we've picked it for our July FEC selection.