Among
Maria Semple's credits from her years in television is
a stint as a consulting producer
on Arrested Development, a show filled with profoundly unlikeable characters. But their
hatred for each other is consistently played
for laughs, something
that can't be said of Semple's debut novel, This One Is Mine, which lacks the comic sprightliness that might make the odiousness bearable.
Violet, a bored stay-at-home
Mulholland Drive mom, meets a bass player named Teddy in the park and decides to run away with him,
even though he doesn't seem that interested in being with her. (Plus he's already attached
to a Kennedy.) Her husband, a
world-renowned music executive, is as oblivious to this
development as anything else in her life, though he's
prone to flying
into fits of rage
when the house is out of order. His sister Sally—once
a promising ballerina,
now on a practically
Jamesian mission to get married
as soon as possible—has latched onto a nerdy
statistician named Jeremy who's about to get his own TV spot.
These
self-absorbed characters bobble around in their own invented malaise, never realizing how ridiculous
they seem, but even their comically
exaggerated unawareness,
such as Sally's outsized exasperation at the friend who introduced
Jeremy to her, becomes tiresome.
Compounding their obtuseness, characters fall into lines of being either stupid
or loathsome. At least the
loathsome ones are entertaining, like Violet's pet bass player, a former drug addict whose
refusal to sleep with her is infuriating, since it makes
her realize she can't buy everything. Sally
is unable to rein herself
in even when her
desire for
attention threatens to capsize her
relationship with Jeremy, who is depicted as an emotionless automaton totally
taken in by her con. Scraping
up sympathy for her later in the book is a chore, even as she expects it of
Violet. A scene where a character experiences an epiphany from
within the strictures of an unduly punishing yuppie yoga retreat is a comic
delight, but it only highlights how
flat the other inhabitants of this
world tend to be. Maybe this collection
of misanthropes just
needs a few commercial breaks, but the
inner anger that bubbles out at every opportunity makes them, even satirically,
a pain to have around.