WHAT’S THE GIRL WORTH?

A hard-shelled 20-year-old Boston University student on a summer internship in Madrid receives a visit from her longtime deadbeat dad.

Catherine has come to Madrid mainly to take a break from her nowhere job at a cocktail waitress at Shooters, in Boston, where she is working her way single-mindedly through school. Brought up largely by her mother—since her father, a drunk who hit his wife over the head with a brick, left home when Catherine was eight—Catherine has grown tough and wary of men (“how little you could trust them”). In Madrid, she works desultorily in a p.r. firm, living with two pampered sisters and going out often and late with a wealthy gay man, Esteban, who may or may not be a pimp. The summer is defined by her “frigidity,” as one rich, nosy acquaintance, Monica, describes it, until Catherine’s father arrives for a week of sauced, awkward encounters in Madrid that help Catherine come to a sense of her own self-worth. (The title refers to a bar game the father and daughter played when she was small and he took her on long afternoon binges.) Second-novelist Fitzpatrick (Where We Lived, 2001) has a touching father-daughter drama going in flashbacks that set up the new meeting between them in the present; she also, however, indulges in a lot of meandering and childish venting of pent-up emotion (between Catherine and her fragile gay roommate, Harlan, back in Boston, and other dubious male specimens) that leak away the story’s potential impact. Fitzpatrick’s method is to pour it all in, when selection might have been more effective. Moreover, Catherine, a girl with some chutzpah and ponderous first-person reflection, rarely speaks in more than one-liner expletives, so that the other characters’ attraction to her is left unclear.

Long-winded buildups and lots of drinking in upscale Madrid bars for a plucky American-in-Spain and her loser father.