Book Review: The Big Love

Sarah Dunn’s surprisingly touching debut novel The Big Love is an interesting exploration of the empowering effects a devastating breakup can have for a woman. Alison Hopkins, an engaging and slightly neurotic 32-year-old, is happy in love with her live-in boyfriend Tom. That is, until the night Tom goes out to buy mustard for a dinner party and never returns. He calls Alison from a payphone, tells her that he is in love with his ex-girlfriend (with whom he has been having an affair for months), and will not be coming home. It is at this point of confused shock that Dunn begins her sweetly humourous investment into Alison’s despair and joy.

Alison is a writer of a weekly relationship column for a trendy newspaper in Philadelphia—“I feel I should point out that I became the kind of columnist I became before it was cliché, before the Suddenly Susan-ness of it all hit the culture full-force, before the whole thing became boring, silly, and obvious.” The fodder for her column is her relationship with Tom, meaning that the end of their relationship also means the end of her column. But not until after Alison indulges in a short fling with her new boss Henry who sees her as being the carefree girl she is not.

This affair is monumental on a couple levels. First, Henry is only the third man that Alison has ever slept with and his assumption of her carefree status throws her off kilter; so much so that she ends up storming into his office to ask about their relationship (you can imagine how well that turns out). Second, she is an evangelical Christian (albeit lapsed) and much of the emotional and psychological turmoil she processes is wrapped up in her desire to reclaim her faith.

At times, Alison feels constricted by her faith as it conflicts with her emotions and desires and constructs numerous gray areas in terms of her values. At other times though Alison’s faith provides a very real grounding for figuring out who she is, despite the love-hate relationship she has with it. It is ultimately Alison’s struggle to intertwine her quest for “the big love” with her quest for faith that gives her the perspective necessary to kick Tom out of her life for good and to embark on her own unique path.

Dunn, a columnist and one-time television writer for sitcoms "Murphy Brown" and "Spin City", has written an insightful first novel that has the interesting feel of numerous columns strung together. The writing pops off the page in equal doses of humor and wisdom. There are numerous pop culture references through out that are cleverly placed for maximum comedic effect (“toasting is the new prayer”) and provide a nice respite from Alison’s befuddling deliberations. The Big Love is a wonderful read, and Dunn has much to be proud of with the conflicted yet strong female character she has created in Alison Hopkins.

Line By Line: Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

"We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor."

"We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. "

"Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days."

"almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on"

"We thanked each other. It was customary after every exchange. Our thanks were never disingenuous or ironic. We said thanks for getting this done so quickly, thanks for putting in so much effort. We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other."

Table of Contents: Beginner's Greek

Author: James Collins
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2008
Synopsis: When Peter Russell finally meets the woman of his dreams he falls as madly in love as you can on a flight from New York to LA. Her name is Holly. She's achingly pretty with strawberry-blonde hair, and reads Thomas Mann for pleasure. She gives Peter her phone number on a page of The Magic Mountain , but in his room that night Peter finds the page is inexplicably, impossibly, enragingly...gone. So begins the immensely entertaining story of Peter and his unrequited love for his best friend's girl; of Charlotte and her less-than-perfect marriage to a man in love with someone else; of Jonathan and his wicked and fateful debauchery; and of Holly, the impetus for it all. Along the way, there's the evil boss, the desirable temptress, miscommunications, misrepresentations, fiendish behavior, letters gone astray, and ultimately, an ending in which every character gets his due. Both incisive and wonderfully funny, this is a brilliantly understated comedy of manners in which love lost is found again.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"...“Beginner’s Greek” is, from start to finish, delicious."

Pop Matters
"...is resolutely old fashioned"

USA Today
"... a literary love story for grown-ups..."

Entertainment Weekly
"[Collins] makes magic of it all by infusing those would-be clichés with so much old-school charm that you want to believe, and with so much patient detail that you actually can."

Christian Science Monitor
"...has a rare ability to satirize without becoming nasty, and periodically gives romantic clichés a good tweak"

New York Daily news
"...filled with charming twists of fate in the lives of New York's poshest."

San Francisco Chronicel
""Beginner's Greek" touches on all the traditional details of a comedy of manners..."

Washington Post
"Though Collins crafts the occasional charming scene or sentence, he routinely serves up clunkers such as referring to a man's formal footwear as "black patent leather pumps"..."

New York Observer
"He has acquitted himself admirably as far as a potentially commercial entertainment is concerned. But as the phrase went in the days before e-mail, parts of his novel seem to have been phoned in."

Extras:
Read the First Chapter Online!

Table of Contents: Gods Behaving Badly

Author: Marie Phillips
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year: 2007
Synopsis: The twelve gods of the Greek Pantheon are still alive (they are immortal) and living in a dirty, rat-infested house in modern-day London. Compelled partly out of boredom they take on everyday jobs that, in one way or another, match their "godly" skills: dog walker, phone sex operator, bartender. When two mortals (Alice and Neil) are unwittingly pulled into their godly orbit, the pair must figure out how to muddle through their own budding romance amidst all the confusion and interference.


What Others Have to Say:
New York Times
"...much more fun than it has any right to be"

The Independent (UK)
"...delightfully original as well as acutely clever in a makes-you-think-about-contemporary-morality-without-realising kind of way."

The Globe and Mail
"...has made the gods and goddesses so consistent in their arrogance and obliviousness that they are truly believable and likeable."

USA Today
"...a charming comic touch and the laughs are real, even if some seem in need of a sitcom laugh track."

Pop Matters
"...Phillips has a knack for conveying the fluidity of human emotion."

Entertainment Weekly
"Marie Phillips' writing is fizzy, her premise clever, and her first novel amusing — if not immortal."

Christian Science Monitor
"Phillips's novel is at once a witty, effervescent romantic comedy and an irreverent primer on Greek mythology."

London Times
"the cleverness is that Phillips does with Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo et al precisely what the Greeks did with them. They become many-times-magnified versions of us."

Washington Post
"Phillips has an Olympian sense of absurdity, and there's enough ambrosial wit here to seduce most mortals for an afternoon or two on the divan."