ALL THIS BELONGS TO ME

An unwittingly offensive novel from Hudler (Househusband, 2001, etc.).

Geena Pangborn hates her life. She’s just lost her teenaged son, and her marriage is unsatisfying. Her solution: run away from home. As she propels her SUV away from Sublette, Colo., Geena daydreams about the hurt and confusion her disappearance will cause her insensitive husband. After days on the road, Geena realizes that she’s not going to get far with the few hundred dollars in cash that she brought, and she doesn’t want to use plastic because a paper trail will ruin her revenge fantasy. Geena is counting her pennies and eating at happy-hour buffets when the fallout from an overturned mail truck provides her with an answer: a fresh MasterCard. At this point in the narrative, the reader has little reason to care for Geena, and her subsequent behavior provides ample opportunity to dislike her. Utterly untroubled by the consequences of her actions, and fueled by an infantile sense of entitlement, Geena rampages into the life of the MasterCard’s rightful owner, Ellis Norton, an octogenarian Thomas Edison enthusiast and a docent at the inventor’s Florida estate. While Geena brings some fun to Ellis’s spare and cautious existence—fun she’s charging on his credit card, it should be noted—she is basically self-serving and, ultimately, destructive. Unlike Geena, Ellis is a sympathetic, distinctive character, capable of sustaining a whole novel. (If Hudler were interested in exploring friendship, she would have done better to examine more closely that between Ellis and his boss, another nuanced, well-drawn character.) Alas, by the end, one is left with the sense that Ellis—and the reader—would have been better off without Geena.

Two narratives—one interesting but underdeveloped, the other truly awful—mashed together into a callow attempt at “women’s fiction.”