ELBOWING THE SEDUCER

by T. Gertler ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 11, 1984

Adultery among the literary folk in New York City--in a first novel that's modestly entertaining when it sticks to ironic observation, shaky whenever it ventures (with sentimentality sneaking through) into more soulful postures. The woman whom just about everybody sleeps With here is Dina Reeve, a young would-be writer--as ""D. Reeve"" and, later, ""D. Leitman""--who's married to unsuccessful painter Larry and living in cramped bohemian squalor. (""She had hoped that by holding Larry, she would be holding art. Instead she had trapped herself as wholly as a suburban matron, but with no consolations: no house, car, charge accounts, neatly stitched episiotomy."") But things start looking up when Dina, ""small and occasionally pretty,"" gets an enthusiastic response to her short-story from Howard Ritchie, ""a disgraced one-time would-be copywriter and failed anthologist"" who now edits the university-based literary magazine Rosemary. Soon Dina, bedazzled by Howard's editorial allure, is becoming the latest in his long line-up of afternoon mistresses. She leaves her husband, turns her obsessive Howard-affair into a supposedly strong (actually unimpressive) story, which ends: ""You have one finger in my cunt, one up my ass. I'm scored, I'm skewered, I'm screwed."" Meanwhile, to ease marital tension, Howard has maneuvered his second wife Suzanne into an affair with budding novelist Vincent Bask--pinkly ugly, sexually well-endowed. And, in the novel's second half, some of the already-scattery focus shifts to Howard's old friend Newman Sykes, a married book critic who tries to revive his sluggish sex-life with some three-sles-in-the-shower (joining Howard and literary agent Maris), with a bit of Dina's wan sexual compliance. Finally, however, Dina and Vincent wind up together--while slimy Howard and pompous Newman shuffle back to their wives (one of whom has become a little unhinged by all this bed-traffic). Gertler does a solid, nasty job in the portraits of Howard and Newman; there are shrewd urban recognitions, more than a few funny lines. Unfortunately, however, this is a novel without a mainspring: Dina is a blurry, neither-here-nor-there protagonist--sometimes viewed with irony, more often treated with a dignity and seriousness she doesn't seem to deserve; her progress through the novel carries no point or momentum (other than a vague aroma of petulant self-justification). And the prose here, often witty and muscular, too often slips over into cutesy excess, mixed metaphors, or pseudo-poetics--especially in the many sex sequences. A talented but unoriginal, uneven, and fundamentally slight first novel, then--even if sure to attract some attention with its roman à clef innuendoes (Howard and Newman may be recognized by the book-chat set) and overall literary-gossip approach.

Pub Date: May 11, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION