SEDATING ELAINE

A woman must navigate the demands of her sexually voracious girlfriend while staying one step ahead of her drug dealer’s terrifying enforcers, Betty and the Ladies.

Frances owes money to her dealer, Dom. She has one week to pay up or else he’ll have no choice but to call in his enforcer, Betty, who does horrifying things with a straightening iron to encourage payment. To make matters worse, Frances’ new girlfriend, Elaine, has become so demanding of her time that Frances has determined to dump her, just as soon as she can get a word in edgewise. But when Dom delivers a warning directly to Frances’ flat, she realizes that desperate times call for desperate measures. In exchange for monthly rent, Frances invites the irrepressible Elaine to move in with her, an agreement to which Elaine enthusiastically agrees. Frances is an emotionally stunted character, still grieving the breakup of her relationship with the woman she believes to be the love of her life, still suffering from her mother’s childhood abandonment, so overwhelmed by the world that she has stayed in the same dishwashing job for years because the routine brings a numbing escape from her feelings. In spite of Frances’ truculence, Elaine—who is bouncy, bubbly, raunchy, and desperately needy—is head over heels in love and sets about remaking Frances in the image of someone capable of loving her back. After only a day or so of cohabitation, Frances has had enough. She embarks on a plan to keep Elaine quiet—with the help of a sedative procured by Dom and slipped into Elaine’s cinnamon latte. When this plan goes predictably wrong, Frances is forced to confront the demons of her own past as she runs from the iron-wielding harpies of her future. The result is an eager, slightly unwieldy novel that suffers from its tendency to slip into an expository style. Frances’ reluctance to engage with her girlfriend often slides into outright cruelty, and the fun the book pokes at the expense of Elaine’s frank and overambitious sexuality mirrors that cruelty rather than diffusing or justifying it. A turn at the end seeks to ratify this dynamic, but it is too little too late to redeem “Funny Frances,” as Elaine calls her, who seems willing to let almost anything happen to the people around her if it buys her a little more time to stew on her own hurt feelings.

Brash and engaging on the sentence level but fails to create empathy for a main character who feels none herself.