CUPID IS A PSYCHOPATH

A woman besotted by romance novels sets out to land herself a billionaire in this raucous satire.

Veego Drake is a handsome billionaire who’s averse to commitment: “With the most beautiful women in the world throwing themselves at me…I’m going to restrict myself to just one of them?” he scoffs. He is, however, receptive to reproducing so that, as he puts it, his “seed could launch a new race of superhumans.” Wetta Vane sees Veego on TV and decides, in line with the bodice-rippers she gleans from the dump near her trailer park, that he’ll fall madly in love with her as soon as they meet. Veego’s scheming assistant, Richard Straun, who considers his boss “a self-absorbed scumbag with the emotional depth of a chihuahua,” allows her to see his boss; when Veego passes out from salmonella poisoning, Wetta settles into his palatial bedroom to beguile him by reading aloud from her favorite novel, The Greek Billionaire Prince’s Ultimate Revenge. Enter the mythological being Cupid, whose arrow magically infuses Veego’s body with the fictional prince’s personality and ardor—and mischievously directs his passion not at Wetta but at Myrna Potts, a middle-aged temp cleaning lady whom Richard then pays to accommodate Veego’s advances. Andris’ farce reflects callow romance-novel formulas in a cynical fun-house mirror with mixed results. The plot has a few too many contrivances and side characters; it runs into third-act problems; and the satire feels overly broad and predictable. The characters are as cartoonish as their genre models, with Veego a stereotypical wealthy narcissist and Wetta a stereotypical delusional ditz. Myrna is the only complex figure, and her musings on her plutocratic clients offer the sharpest critique of the romance of wealth and status: “When they saw her, if they saw her at all, she was pretty sure they thought, because they had buckets of money and she could barely scrape two cents together, she was less than them—less important, less smart, less everything.” Still, Andris’ prose is vigorous and scintillating throughout, and the book within the book parody of romances—“The kiss, the mast of his manhood rammed into her stomach, the scorch of his body grinding against hers”—is hilariously spot-on.

An entertaining, if often obvious, sendup of romance-lit clichés.