In which, by way of consolation to those who've felt that my reviews may have overlooked their books' best point, I deliver a harsh review to a novel that's sold well. Some people do manage to like this book. I did not.
Title: Dumping Billy
Author: Olivia Goldsmith
Quote: “I thought that if I just said ‘Mommy, come back’ a million times that she would be back.”
CONTAINS SPOILERS. This novel deserves all the spoiling it can get.
There’s chick lit, which is a flippant, affectionate if satirical, look at very young women and their little mental worlds of self, sex, and stuff, and there’s hateful, hurtful stereotyping of young women as fools. Dumping Billy is definitely the latter. I feel uncomfortable displaying it for sale. I have it, and will sell it, if someone Out There is doing a study of “backlash” misogyny in recent pop culture. I didn’t feel that reading it had done me any permanent harm, but I did feel slimed.
This novel begins with its heroine, a psychologist, debunking a little boy’s Magical Thinking, and then goes on to indulge its readers in a kind of Magical Thinking that’s as toxic and as pathetic as the child’s.
A woman—according to the jacket drawing, a remarkably unattractive woman, in Halloween-witch shoes and boxy checkered skirts that make her flab the focal point, and apparently having “lost her head”—wants, just because she’s thirty, to be married. She broke up with a man to whom she was intensely attracted because he was participating in the Playboy Game, in which men who can get all the benefits of marriage without marriage understandably don’t want to follow through on the promise of marriage even when the women have their own money. These women’s mothers bartered sex for some amount of “security” but women like Kate Jamison are giving away sex, expecting to get security, and feeling heartbroken when what they get is used and discarded. Kate, having been used by Steven (to whom she was and still is attracted), is now being used by Michael (to whom she’s not even attracted), just because she was brought up Catholic and is going through the motions, at least, of having sex in the Catholic way. A happy ending for this character might involve her discovering The Rules and letting the men be the ones to beg her to take The Relationship out of the friend zone, but it doesn’t.
The “social value” that saves this novel from being classified as strictly soft porn comes from a lingering glance at the folk cultures evolving in different New York City neighborhoods. If your tolerance for New York City allows you to notice its having different neighborhoods rather than seeing it as one big mess, you can enjoy rating the author’s observations. “It’s always hotter in Manhattan than it is in Brooklyn,” a character wails, because of “all the sidewalks.” Kate grew up in Brooklyn and has a best-friend-forever and some other old childhood pals who still live there. In Manhattan her best friends are a male homosexual couple. They behave like Worst Friends who dispense bad advice and unhelpful emotional comfort, but they love to listen as Kate, and even more her best friend Bina, wail about the men who use them and leave them. I’ll take Goldsmith’s words that male homosexual couples who can suppress their fundamental misogyny enough to be even Worst Friends to women may exist, somewhere; I’ve never actually met any. Men who identify publicly as homosexual couples are extroverts, and extroverts do very well at being acquaintances but not so well at being friends.
Bina has a crisis when, instead of offering her the engagement ring she knows he’s bought (one of the crowd saw him buy it), Bina’s boyfriend announces that he’s going overseas and “thinks we should explore our singleness.” He doesn’t believe—or make that feel—he can simply take control of his body, telling it “I’m not into diseases, so I’m going to be monogamous, and this is the woman I’ve chosen.” He has to have a few months of shameless promiscuity and see whether he can get a disease from some foreigner he picks up in a foreign bar. I believe that men like that exist, but does anyone actually marry them? When they’re not even pregnant, I mean?
Bina sinks into a pathological emotional state, clinging desperately not only to Kate but to the “gay” couple, and this inspires the nerdier half of the couple, Elliott, to come up with a theory: There’s a rich, good-looking, playboy-type bartender who’s won the nickname of “Dumping Billy.” He answers to “Billy” not “Bill,” he always shows his date a good time, he attracts attention to himself and to her, and the last half-dozen women he’s dated and dumped have all married other men within a few months. If Bina can just be seen with Billy a few times, her boyfriend is sure to come back. Billy just happens to be between bedmates now.
So Kate and Elliott set up a date for Bina and Billy. Bina reports that the social event went well, but oh, she feels like a bad girl having enjoyed sex so much, but “he” was so nice, etc., etc. Since we’ve been convinced that Bina’s head contains nothing but a “biological clock,” and since this is supposed to be a comedy, we are supposed to believe that Bina keeps babbling about how nice “he” is for weeks before disclosing that, while being seen with Billy, she’s actually having a fling with yet another man.
Meanwhile, in between behaving well in public with Bina, Billy also seems to be attracted to Kate. At least, though they’re not going out, working together, or admitting they like each other, they’re soaking a lot of sheets. And Michael is totally turning Kate off with his assumption that, like any “nice” girl who settles for a Playboy-type relationship, she’s eager to marry him and will want to move across the country when he does, though he’s been offered a better job in Texas and she’s not. Her secret fling with Billy seems, rather than sapping her self-respect as such flings tend to do in real life, to give Kate the fortitude to tell Michael she’s not willing to relocate. By the time Bina’s boyfriend gets home, Kate’s positively shoving Bina at him, telling Bina that even after all that torrid sex—with Max! Not Billy!—“You want to be married to Jack. It’s what you’ve always wanted,” so Kate can be the next woman to be seen with Dumping Billy.
But, because this is the very sickest kind of fantasy, instead of having nice dates for a few weeks and then breaking that up and having that raise Kate’s point value in the dating game, Kate and Billy break up right away. Billy discovers that he doesn’t want to be used to get Kate and Steven married, and Kate discovers that, although living with a drunken widowed father had given her the sort of attitude toward alcohol that at least four out of five people of Irish descent need to have, her hormones are raging as they’ve never raged before. So, although the rest of their relationship is left to the reader’s horrified imagination, we’re told that they marry each other in the end.
Right. Flop into bed with a well-known commitment-phobic playboy, girls, and instead of the usual fumbling that makes cocktail parties or, for that matter, dental appointments seem like fun, you’ll have the kind of experience real couples have to be married for a year or two to achieve, before you’ve even agreed to a second date, and he’ll turn into a prince and you’ll live happily ever after…or perhaps not, perhaps you’ll be absolutely miserable, but at least being married to a bartender means you can always get drunk enough to forget what a bad choice you made.
Fantasies have their uses. The good ones help us visualize better worlds and better selves. Fantasy adventures at least get us thinking about what courage, loyalty, and love mean to us. Elaborating our fantasy worlds can inspire artistic and even scientific work. If the “Rings” and Narnia fantasies didn’t make Tolkien and Lewis rich during their lifetimes, they’ve certainly been blessings to those authors’ heirs, and look at what Harry Potter and Game of Thrones have done for their authors. The first thing we can all safely say about Sigmund Freud is that he was totally wrong about the value of fantasy…
Except when it’s the cheap, self-serving kind of fantasy that leads people to make really bad choices based on their attachments to sick, self-serving fantasies. Asking open-ended questions like “If I were forced to participate in a sadistic ‘survival’ game where I was being set up to bond with a friend just in order that I could then be set up to have to kill my friend, how could I get out of that situation other than by killing my friend?” gives the world novels like House of Stairs, The Hunger Games, and Headspace, and may give some of us useful ways to think about, e.g., whether people who’ve been playing on our team all through high school become mere competition for university scholarships. But fantasies like “I’ll be the one poor fool ‘Dumping Billy’ doesn’t want to dump, I’ll be the one person in a million who can use cocaine in moderation, or even the one Irish person in five who can drink alcohol in moderation, I’ll be the first to pull off this particular kind of crime and not get caught,” lead people into real trouble.
I despise the sick fantasy in this book and so, although I’ve liked some of Goldsmith’s other attempts at comedy, I’m sure people who like New York would enjoy the neighborhood study, and the sex is no more explicit than kids are likely to see in paperback romances sold in supermarkets, I find myself unwilling to accept the blame for selling Dumping Billy. It is not a book one can display in public with a clear conscience.
Where are the novels about young women who respect themselves, keep their pants on at least until the engagement is announced, and may have announced a few engagements under the influence of movie-theatre activity but can at least still claim to be “sophisticated virgin” brides when they do get married? And then, having given themselves and their mates time to grow up, they stay married? We need more novels like that.
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