Faking It By Elisa Lorello
Genre: Casual Fiction, Slight Romance, Bargain Bin
Content: PG-13
Grade: B
Sticking with the Author: Yes
I had been attempting to find something amusing to read when spending a few hours in the car on the way to Cleveland. I happened upon Faking It for a buck on Amazon. I found that the language was more impressive than the story arc, which was often unbelievable. But, I was happily distracted and that's all I really ask for.
Elisa Lorello teaches academic writing at NC State. She had taught rhetoric and composition. Though at first it appeared that her heavy emphasis on language might upend a casual work of fiction, she managed to find a pleasing medium. It isn't often in a popcorn paperback that I stop to reread lines out loud simply because I like the way they sound, but I found my self doing that again and again in Faking It. My poor husband had to endure several rounds of "Listen to this" during commercial breaks during Monday Night Raw, so I don't think he particularly cared for Ms. Lorello. But her language hearkens strongly to much more accomplished writers and I cannot find fault in it.
Faking It is about a thirty something rhetoric professor (shocking, I know), Andi Cutrone, who has come back to NY heartbroken after spending several years teaching in New England. She gets settled in a non-tenured track position near her best friend and seems to be an intelligent, competent professional. What comes next is an absurd and awkward turn of events at a faculty event, which almost made me put the book down (ok, almost made me hit the menu button on Lavar) and back away slowly. But hey, I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them. It's kind of like when I quit opening my IRA statements last year and just pretended everything was all right.
So everyone is hanging out at a typical faculty happy hour and a one female professor comes in on the arm of a truly gorgeous man that happens to be an escort. Ok, I'm fine at this point. I'm sure these things happen. Perhaps not to me, but I'm in Ohio not New York and the closest thing we have to escort here are... well, just regular old prostitutes and that's only in the Short North or Victorian Village. But the weird turn here is that all of these lady rhetoric professors seem to be passing this escort (Devin) around like a blunt at a George Clinton concert. He's like having a really good gutter guy that you tell your friends about. You should really call Mike to clean your gutter, here's his card.
Oh and did I mention that Devin doesn't actually sleep (in the most Bill Clinton understanding of sexual intimacies) with any of these women but they max out there credit cards or take out second mortgages on their homes to pay for a night with him? Well, he is an art history major so you have to take that into account. Very a la the Wedding Date and you are saying to yourself right now... that's what she's reading? I'm slightly disappointed in her. Please be patient.
Now, our heroine who has been minding her own business grading papers and getting over her lost love. She finally decides that her inexperience in the ways of love requires her to make the acquaintance of our fine escort in the hopes of entering into an agreement. She's doesn't got the kind of cash Devin requires, so she want to bargain, to barter, to exchange goods. She'll teach him to write if she teaches her to well... not suck in the sack. Again, I'm sure this happens all the time. I'm going to ask my Jiffy Lube guy, Thomas, if I can write him his last will and testament in exchange for my next oil change (but I will insist he throw in a new cabin air filter, I'm not cheap). But Devin agrees to the arrangement over cheese cake and a written contract is drawn up and signed and is of course, ridiculously unenforceable... but again, I'm suspending disbelief.
But what comes next is actually a surprisingly candid reflection on the way relationships and experiences in childhood compound through the years and end up affecting people into adulthood in ways they never imagined- in work, love, sex, guilt. The painful pieces always stay with us and help to form our patterns and attachments. This book breaks down the preconceived notions that people have about one another and themselves through the self discovery of Devin and Andi. There relationship is alternatively uncomfortable and soulful. The discoveries feel real, though it took us an awful long time to get here hauling a rather large and burdensome literary device.
Andi begins to understand herself and finds Sam, another English professor, with whom she begins a long distance relationship. She then struggles with between the feelings she develops with Sam and the inevitable pull she feels for the gorgeous escort that is teaching her what most teenage girls figure out on their own in exchange for a community college creative writing class. It's a story as old as time really.
That being said, this is no Pretty Woman and people aren't wrapped up in pretty little packages. They stay broken and there are no happily ever afters....
All in all, definitely worth my time.
No comments:
Post a Comment