Book Review: Mail Order Persuasion

Title: Mail Order Persuasion

Author: Farrah Lee

Date: 2019

Publisher: Farrah Lee

Quote: "[A] tiny hurricane that barely reached his armpit blew into the bar like the Tasmanian devil."

Though I appreciate the merits of Neil Young's "Monsanto" song, I think his best song ev-ah was the National Anthem of the Land of Wimpy Guys:

"You are like a hurricane,

There's a storm in your eyes,

And I'm getting blown away!

Somewhere secret where the feelings stay

I want to love you, but I'd just get blown away."

If they had enough fortitude to recognize that they couldn't keep up with us before they caterwauled about how much they wanted, needed, loved, etc., etc., they might deserve a little empathy. 

The fictional hero of this novel, Kellan, at least thinks he has a little more fortitude than that when he meets Poppy. That seems to be her actual name, but it could as easily be a nickname she's earned by being an attention-deficient mess who "pops off" and follows her impulses. She rushes into the bar banging into things and spills wine on Kellan and herself. Only hours later, they meet again at the dry cleaners', and this time she's carrying coffee. Then he comes into Poppy's workplace and orders dinner, she waits on him, they get into a conversation, and she pours water on him. Kellan's dried-out, lawyerly affections are like a desert plant. They sprout and bloom when exposed to liquid. He can't change his plans and stay in Sydney to pursue the "tiny hurricane" that is Poppy. He has to go back to New York on schedule. 

But he thinks about Poppy. He thinks about Sydney, which, like many cities, seems positively pleasant by comparison with New York. When he thinks, he drinks. Before you know it he's drunk enough to tell his aunt that he met a woman on this trip to Sydney who gave him a business card for "an elite dating services" that offers mail-order matchmaking, and although he didn't like any woman he's actually known during all these years well enough to propose, he thinks he wants a mail-order bride. 

Be it known to The Nephews that if any of you did any such thing I'd say that you were in no condition to meet the most pathetic streetcorner girl in Lusaka, much less anyone I'd want you to meet, and advise three years of sobriety before you asked for or accepted a date. 

Kellan's aunt, however, thinks he needs an heir. (She has children of her own who might find a use for his estate some day. She is being very unselfish on their behalf.) So she just fills out a form for him and sends it to the woman he met, who happens to be Poppy's equally desperate, but more disciplined, entrepreneur friend. He talked to her in the hope that she could arrange a chance for him to talk to Poppy, who's been bolting impulsively away, feeling mortified, every time they've met. 

But it's not meant to be. Poppy's life is a mess. Physically thirty-five years old, mentally about thirteen, she's a student but dependent on an open-ended relationship with a man to pay her tuition. She's still doing a student labor job, and she got that because the owner of the business was her parents' friend. The man with whom she's been living would have married her already had that ever been his intention, and is bringing home other women when she's at work, or he thinks she is. Poppy packs her bag and stomps out, although she doesn't even have a car to live in and has to depend on friends to keep her off the street at night. In order to stay in school and rent another place she needs to find a job with a higher salary. She's called in for an interview for a sales job, given a test instead, paid a commission because she does so well on the test, then told someone else has already taken the actual job. 

Clearly the only way to keep this gal off welfare would be if she could marry a billionnaire. Kellan just happens to be one. So her best friend cheerfully draws up a contract. Poppy is acting more desperate, impulsive, and immature than ever when she's forced actually to talk to Kellan--she keeps trying to bolt again--but common sense is clearly not a quality Kellan wants in a wife.

It's a comedy--the first in a series of comedies about rich men and pretty women who are comically clueless, whose weddings Poppy's friend will arrange for a fee. If you think marriage is not the kind of institution where people who act like this couple, at thirty-five, belong, you might laugh, but not in a nice way.

If you like this kind of story you may want to collect the whole series. 

It's fiction, but it's based on fact. There are men, desperate divorced fathers e.g., who don't mind admitting: they're not "in love," and don't expect to be; they're not even looking for a prostitute so much as a nanny, and they're prepared to fund a desperate, usually very young, woman's education, her immigration to the country of her choice, her medical bills or her parents', whatever. The woman gets the legal status of "wife" rather than "domestic help." Sometimes it works. For the only people I ever knew who tried it, it worked because both parties recognized it as a job contract with rules they found more advantageous than the standard job contract, but anything can happen. Somewhere there probably are mail-order couples who have "fallen in love." 

Never mind the other kind of mail-order couples, Poppy's friend may think she can keep the business "elite" and only ever marry idiot girls to bungling billionnaires, but sooner or later such "agents" end up placing orphans in the custody of child abusers. But they have also placed deserving students, cancer patients, even actual refugees, in contact with decent people who fulfill their contracts, even if they don't "fall in love." Good things as well as bad things sometimes happen in this world.