Author: Amanda Filipacchi Title: Love Creeps Genre: chick-lit
You either love it or don't give a shit.
An old joke tells us that there are three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't. Ba-dump-bump.
In fact, there are actually two kinds of people, and in this particular case the criterion is the following question: do you tear up and wail along like a drunk sailor every time you hear Sinatra crooning "New York, New York," or Billy Joel warbling "New York State of Mind"? You do? I'll bet you think Woody Allen is a genius, too! Amanda Filipacchi, author of Love Creeps, most assuredly belongs to that type. I, on the other hand, don't. So why was I reading the book? Well, it looked interesting - but looks can be deceiving. Very deceiving.
Chock Full O' Nuts*
Nut the first is lovely Lynn Gallagher, thirty-something owner of an oh-so-hip Manhattan art gallery. Lynn has a problem - she has "lost her desire."
Nut the second is accountant (but not CPA) Alan Morton. Alan knows exactly what he wants: Lynn. He's so certain that he wants a woman he's never met that when we first meet him he is peeping through her gallery windows in broad daylight: stalking her. Alan's also a bit obsessive in his own right- every night he checks the fire doors on every floor of his apartment building.
Nut the third is French émigré Roland Dupont, successful lawyer. As far as he knows, his life is just hunky-dory. Boy, is he in for a surprise... Not so big a surprise, though, that he'll pop the little surprise in the mysterious locket that never leaves his neck.
And then the world shifts on its axis.
Deciding that the best means of relocating her lost desire is to copy Alan and thus become a stalker herself, Lynn chooses Roland as her target. Throughout the streets surrounding her gallery - where, conveniently, both Roland and Alan live - Roland, Lynn, and Alan form a strange little three-car train. Roland wandering from office to courtroom to restaurant to club (at every juncture "accidentally" dropping a small item - a button, a paper clip, a penny); Lynn hot on his trail; Alan following at a sedate 100 yard interval like a puppy in fear of a newspaper. When Alan figures out that Lynn's stalking Roland, he ingratiates himself to the man as a racquetball partner, learning to his chagrin that the gifts and love poems that he sent to Lynn she merely repackaged and passed on to Roland.
In a truly senseless development (have these fools never heard of TROs?), Alan and Roland decide to attempt to jar Lynn into falling for Alan by spending successive weekends with the two men. As one expects, the plan backfires. What a surprise...
Be careful what you wish for: you might get it
Ahh, yes, of course Lynn and Roland separate and she begins to fixate on Alan - now happily cohabiting with a rat and a recovering (but not very) sex addict named Jessica. And so the strange little three-car train slides into reverse. Lynn stalks Alan and Roland stalks Lynn, much to the consternation of...
Nut the fourth, a homeless ex-psychologist named Ray who was drummed out of the profession for ECD: "excessive curiosity disorder." And so it is that Ray - therapist skills intact even after a couple of years on the street - pulls the three together and the four of them enter a strange pact. Whaddya know - it works. Or does it? As you may have gathered from the opening paragraph I am not a Woody Allen fan. No, thanks, I'll take my neuroses in small, measured doses, not flung at me willy-nilly like Roger Clemens fastballs. And that is exactly the same reason that I found this book to be just a shade shy of drivel. There is but one character in the entire book who does not have some bizarre functional disorder, and she is pretty darned flat. We have OCD. Stalkers. The invented (as far as google knows) "ECD." Sex addiction. "Loss of desire" - hey, don't I get about a billion spams a day about those two? Kindly deliver me from the impression that one of every four Manhattanites is a therapist and the rest are their patients, OK? Sheesh!
Filipacchi, on the other hand, is one of Woody's fans - you can tell, not merely because all her characters are as neurotic as Annie Hall, but because she actually inserts Woody and Soon Yi into the text. I knew it! One wonders if her other two novels (Nude Men and Vapor) are so searingly dull.
Even given my disregard for Filipacchi's personal hero and lack of identification with her book's characters Love Creeps would never make it to my list of books to take to my desert island. Why? Because, quite frankly, it's boring. It's badly written - Filipacchi needs to learn a few bits of grammar (or get a better editor) as well as realize how few people actually are this neurotic.
So I repeat the question: if you tear up and wail along like a homesick, drunken merchant mariner every time you hear Sinatra croon "New York, New York," or Billy Joel warble "New York State of Mind," this book's for you. If you don't, skip it. I will tell you one thing - the gushy blurbs on the book's back cover told me to avoid the three authors (as if I didn't already know about Tama Janowitz).
* Let me hasten to point out before I am vilified by someone for my "cavalier" treatment of the mentally ill, that I am merely quoting Amanda Filipacchi herein, both in the use of the disparaging term "nut" for the mentally ill and in the use of the trademarked name "Chock Full O 'Nuts" - and Filipacchi doesn't acknowledge Sara Lee, either. Go fire off a nasty email to her.