Midwesterner Bette fled Ohio after her lover, Frederick, broke her heart when she was 20 years old. Thirty years later, middle-aged Bette is living in Greenwich Village and still hoping to reconcile with Frederick. It's 1958, and the village is home to a mix of working-class and bohemian residents. Bette lives a quiet life, working as a secretary and spending her evenings reading, talking, and listening to jazz with her neighbor and only friend, Earl. Earl is a 50-year-old gay African American actor with a day job in a slaughterhouse. While Bette is resigned to her solitude, Earl still hopes to find love. The novel takes a dramatic turn with the arrival of Bette's cousin Hortense. An aspiring actress, Hortense left Ohio after discovering that her father, Frederick (yes, Bette's Frederick), was having an affair.
VERDICT The novel is written in a stilted style Schulman describes as "Britishized American English" that is used to disrupt the false neutrality of contemporary literary fiction. Both the author's subjects and style exist outside of the dominant narratives of U.S. literature and will appeal to readers of contemporary literary fiction looking for something new.
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