Love Trouble: New and Collected Work [Paperback]

Veronica Geng (Author), Ian Frazier (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 13, 1999

In this collection of satirical pieces and short humorous fiction, Veronica Geng turns up hilarities large and small in government-speak, gender relations, academia, the mass media, love lives, restaurants, airplanes, and baseball fans. "Often," Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "her writing was the purest satire, in the sense that its preferred outcome would be for its object to fall down dead." Always attuned to the way things sound, Geng was a wicked parodist, a mimic of voices from Henry James to Chandler's private eyes, from LBJ to Pat Robertson. Love Trouble confirms Veronica Geng's place as one of our greatest humorists, who helped to carry the tradition of S.J. Perelman, James Thurber, and Robert Benchley to its illogical conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If there is such a thing as a writer's writer, then the late, beloved Veronica Geng was a humorist's humorist. Geng set herself complicated objects of satire much like poets might challenge themselves to write in an especially difficult form. In the title story, for instance, she riffs on a Village Voice clipping that announced, "This may be the only time in history in which the words 'Mr. Reagan' and 'read Proust' will appear in the same sentence." The resulting sketch, naturally, uses the terms "Mr. Reagan" and "read Proust" in every sentence, with pleasingly surreal results. Contrived? Certainly--but that's the point. A virtuoso mimic, Geng thrived on unlikely juxtapositions. She could reproduce the thickest academese as skillfully as baseball commentary, corporate doublethink, or the prose rhythms of Henry James--even, perhaps preferably, all four at once. (She was also not above a really stunningly odiferous pun--as in "My Mao," for instance, when the Great Leader pleads with his lover, "Please don't squeeze the Chairman.") Here is LBJ baiting an elderly George Bernard Shaw; Flannery O'Connor trading love letters with S.J. Perelman; Richard Nixon tapes reviewed à la Rolling Stone. And who could forget the Eliot pastiche from "Teaching Poetry Writing to Singles"?

Let us go then, you and me,
When the weekend is spread out for us to see
Like a roommate bombed out of his gourd on the pool table....
Oh, do not ask, "You said you were who?
Let us go to the free luau.

As a genre, this sort of literary diversion is never going to make anyone rich; but reading these pieces gives the sensation of watching someone do precisely what she enjoys. There are times, in fact, when you can feel Geng's sentences go positively giddy with joy. "It's my business to love trouble," she writes, in an afternote to the title piece--and a better statement of humor's mission would be difficult to find. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

This collection of short satiric pieces comprises the oeuvre of the late Geng, a writer and editor for the New Yorker from 1976 to 1993. A compilation of two previously published collections, Partners and Love Trouble Is My Business, as well as newer work, this book confirms Geng as one of the most brilliant and encompassing satirists of the last few decades, providing readers unfamiliar with her writing with a concise volume of her caustic wit. Geng skewers the media, literature, sports and economics, but she's at her best when tackling political topics. From imagining the Nixon tapes as though they were a record being reviewed in the Village Voice to a Yankees trade of Bucky Dent for Republican Jack Kemp, Geng's pieces are wickedly smart, whimsically structured and multilayered. Taking a clipping or quote as inspiration, Geng free-associates to flesh out the contours of her signature diatribes. An interesting addition to the volume, as well as its one inconsistency, is an addendum tacked onto the end of each piece of Love Trouble Is My Business explaining its origin. Many of these function as self-consciously clear windows into Geng's thought processes and her friends' input (most notably, Ian Frazier, who also wrote the introduction), as well as hints of the climate of the New Yorker during the end of William Shawn's reign. The collected work of this master of "the epigrammatic genre" is a satisfying treat.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (May 13, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395945577
• ISBN-13: 978-0395945575
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of the 20th century's funniest writers, May 20, 2002

By 

Conrad Heiney "ignatzmous" (Newport Beach, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love Trouble: New and Collected Work (Paperback)

Like Ian Frazier, Harry Shearer, or Bruce Cameron, Veronica Geng had a smooth and easy way of taking on the most insane voices of the 1980s. "Satire" seems too small a word for the wealth of literate and gut-busting funny pieces in this book, which gathers up the bulk of her magazine writing. She perfected the art of topical New Yorker-style humor pieces, usually based on news clippings, and used her huge library of artistic and literary references to great effect. This book belongs on the shelf of everyone who likes to see the great and good get their balloons popped with style and verve. Hilarious stuff.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Veronice Geng, vintage, kapow!, June 7, 1999

By A Customer

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This review is from: Love Trouble: New and Collected Work (Paperback)

Veronica Geng's prose is one of the 20th Century's greatest pleasures. If you've never read Miss Geng's work before, this collection will serve as your birthday present to yourself for the next 10 years. It is an utter delight.