Customer Reviews

It Might Have Been What He Said: A Novel

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Isabel Simpson can't say she wasn't warned. John Vance, her close friend and very wise judge of character, told her: James Willoughby was trouble.

Yes, James writes well --- Isabel can't stop reading his piece in the New York Times travel section. But John Vance is quite clear. James is "impossible to work with." He's from blue blood --- "tired blood."

But Isabel is a publisher on the lookout for a writer with a unique voice. She calls James's agent to set up a lunch. And gets another warning: "Do you understand how impossible he is? I could barely find anyone to work with Willoughby and two thousand words. No one could survive him through the completion of a book."

Despite all reasons not to do it, they meet at Orso --- because this is that kind of a New York book. That is, upper echelon. Powerful people. Insiders. But not, as in chick lit books, doing stupid things with brand names. These are serious people. Isabel, anyway. You don't get to be head of a publishing house --- even with a lot of luck --- at 28 without having a steely intelligence, a smart tongue and a ton of self-confidence.

Like at The Lunch, for example. Isabel is way beyond witty. The dialogue is Edith Wharton on steroids: smart, fast-paced, dangerous. And mean. James is a callow user, a jerk on the make. And Isabel nails him. Crucifies him, in fact. It doesn't take long, just a few words, but they're the right ones. He's dead. She killed him.

And then they get married.

What? Yes. Married. By this time, Collinsworth has laid out James and Isabel's family histories and personal pathologies. And although you, the reader, are screaming at her not to do it, he won't change, he can't change, the romantic in you is saying, yes, go for it, maybe you'll shoot the moon.

That question --- do we change when love strikes? --- is the engine of the book. It is the kind of question so first-rate it will survive second-rate characters and plotting. Happily, the characters are so wonderfully quirky they're far from second-rate; they're strange and creative and although they're not like anyone in your life, you care about them. About both of them. Until.....

There is a murder attempt. I'm not spoiling the book to tell you. The book's opening line is: "Isabel couldn't remember why she tried to kill her husband....it might have been what he said." And that makes the book a thriller. A special kind of thriller. The kind Dominick Dunne writes.

This is a debut novel? Ha. This is as good as books about New York careerists get. You're not standing outside, pressing your nose against the glass in this one --- you're in the room.

And now you can't say you haven't been warned.

Eden Collinsworth's It Might Have Been What He Said begins with an arresting first paragraph:

"Isabel could remember the precise moment she tried killing her husband. Strangely enough, she couldn't recall why."

The lines suggest what sort of a story might follow: layers of mystery and deceit to be unwrapped, and pieces of Isabel's mental puzzle connecting to form a clearer image of the events that precipated the story's violent climax. But that's not what happens. The book tells the story of Isabel's marriage to James, an account that encompasses forays into their respective childhoods. Isabel's was something out of a gothic novel (so even the author tells us), with a distant father who communicated almost exclusively through New York Times clippings, an undemonstrative, mentally ill mother, and a by-the-book nanny. James is the scion of an aristocratic but money-poor Virginia family. James' principal problem is that he's fiscally irresponsible. Isabel's principal problem is James. Their marriage should never have happened, should not have lasted for as long as it did, and when it fails no one should be surprised. As for the book's first lines, their promise is never paid off: Isabel, as it happens, eventually regains her memory of the event without any trouble at all, and the attempted murder, when it's finally detailed to us, proves to be anticlimactic. Since it amounts to nothing in the end, it becomes apparent that Isabel's memory lapse is merely a device used to delay the narration of the dramatic scene.

It's difficult to become emotionally invested in Collinsworth's story. That Isabel and James' marriage ends badly is hardly a tragedy. And Collinsworth's characters are not credible: James is impossibly egocentric and shallow, Isabel impossibly self-possessed (though not, admittedly, when she tries to kill James), and their son Burgo impossibly precocious. Here, for example, is a conversation between Isabel and Burgo when he was perhaps five or six years old:

"'Can you think of fictional icons as symbols of something real?'

Finally, Burgo decided to give his mother a graceful way out. 'Yes, I can think of other examples.'

'They are?'

'Well, Batman is fiction. Ulysses might have been real, but the Cyclops wasn't.'

'The waiter in the Greek coffee shop near my office has a kind of Cyclops unibrow,' said Isabel. She realized she was digressing when she saw her son's impatient look. 'I believe Ulysses was real. Ten years and countless hardships later, he was still trying to return to his wife. Women like to put men to the test, my dear. When your time comes--and it will, Burgo--try to do the right thing.'

Burgo ignored his mother altogether.

'Even in our own family, there is fiction and fact,' he pointed out resolutely.

'Really?'

'Yes...you are fact; and Papi is fiction,' Burgo explained."

There are also episodes in the book that have no apparent purpose--the family's brief move to Los Angeles, their problems with an (impossibly) unpleasant neighbor. Even Isabel's extra-familial relationships--with her colleague John and with reclusive literary agent Monina--add very little to the story. Collinsworth's book has garnered a good deal of praise--Susan Cheever alone calls it "thrilling," "compelling," "gripping," "readable," and "shimmering"--so perhaps I'm missing something. But I left disappointed.

This was an impulse buy for me - I was drawn in by the "something he said" psychological hook. Unfortunately, I wound up with the most irritating and exasperating novel I've read in years. Here are my problems with it:

The milieu. If the thought of selecting a prep school for your child, renting a Paris apartment, or attending a gala fundraiser causes your pulse to quicken, this may be the book for you. If such matters are foreign to your experience or even strike you as irritating, you will *hate* this book.

The plot. The attempted murder is really a cheap "hook" that has been inserted into an otherwise banal fictionalized memoir about a tempestuous marriage and divorce. When the event finally comes about it is laughable in its transparency and lack of consequence. (Googling "it may have been something he said" actually reveals a news story from 2004 that is a possible source for the conceit.)

The writing. In the early chapters I was struck by the stiffness of Ms. Collinsworth's prose. Frankly, it gives the impression of someone just "banging it out" without much attention to style or craft. A random sample:

"When the lentil salad was placed in front of Isabel, James observed, 'You're being very quiet, Madam Publisher.' If ever there were a sound of impending calamity, it resonated in those words."

or, here's a good one, in the same mold:

"'With a butcher knife,' had been the grisly reply. A prepositional clause isn't supposed to be able to stand on its own. This one could. This one drew strength from the still air surrounding it."

Such pronouncements did nothing for me - they've got no rhythm, no snap. Rather than actually invent evocative images or dialogue, Collinsworth has to explicitly tell us that the things she relates are important. Ultimately, however, they are not.

(The most extreme example of this "tell, don't show" strategy is in Isabel's first exposure to James's writing. A better author would have created fictional excerpts from James's piece, to show us exactly what it was that attracted Isabel. Collinsworth simply tells us that the essay is "unconventional and beautifully written," a fact which proves highly dubious as the story wears on and James proves to be both a heel and a failure.)

Since the book is set in the literary world and meditates so fixedly on class, culture, and privilege, Collinsworth's failings strike me as particularly galling. Isabel repeatedly justifies her marriage to James in terms of their mutual wit, talent, and attractiveness. ("He was my intellectual counterweight," she says at one point.) This is the story some people tell themselves to justify simple greed, snobbery, and superficiality. Collinsworth seems similarly deluded about her own powers and the import of her tale.

Eden Collinsworth's first novel is a work of fiction that undoubtedly has some basis in fact, since both author Collinsworth and main character Isabel are high-powered women in the New York publishing industry. Assuming Collinsworth never actually tried to kill her husband, that's where the similarities stop.

The mystery opens with Isabel in her psychiatrist's office answering questions about what she was thinking when she tried to kill her husband of over a decade. Through a series of brief, essay-like chapters, Isabel explores her childhood with a cold, unreachable mother, her early career-climbing days, her introduction to an unlikely, reckless mate, their courtship, and the evolution of a marriage which eventually dissolved in alcoholism, adultery, and anger. Each chapter opens with a poignant sentence about the subject (character) at hand.

The mystery at hand is why Isabel felt compelled to attack her husband, and the answer lies in Isabel's own closeted, tumultuous family history. It's a compelling personal journey, and the prose is articulate and elegant, but this falls short of being a pure five-star narrative. Several characters are underdeveloped, namely Isabel's brother Ian and her older-best-friend-token-gay-man John, who appears in the novel with no backstory and no evidence of why the pair are such fast friends. Collinsworth is compared to Edith Wharton on the back of the hardcover release, and the comparison makes perfect sense, because the author is trying just a bit too hard to achieve the sublime, understated brilliance of Wharton, and she misses the mark. Wharton is larger-than-life, however, and the majority of modern fiction does not compare to her catalogue. Enjoy this book as a mystery/personal history, perhaps in a beach chair this summer.

First let me say, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The chapters were short, quirky and entertaining...

But what occurred to me while reading is the absurdity of a woman's rationalizing--making two-hundred-seventy-nine pages of excuses for what happened. Methinks trying to convince herself--See readers,I'm not an ass or fool or silly mark. Here's why--I a smart twenty-eight-year-old dynamo, was blindsided by a irresponsible user i.e. gigolo please understand...I'm so smart, so soignée so together and on and on ...ad nauseum More excuses: Her strange remote family.....James equally eccentric tired blue-blood one. You see I wasn't normal.

Oh but in the essential ways. Isabel was the typical gigolo mark.. First lack.....Isabel was not a pretty woman, or a sexy woman..or one who would stop a man dead in his tracks (in a city where thousands are). Second deficit: Isabel was inexperienced, her whole charge tunneled myopically towards achieving career success. Why not? What had she to dissuade her? Scores of distracting men phoning, begging for her company? Hardly. Genus Plain Jane over-compensation careerist. Mantra; Okay so I'm not a man magnet--leastways I've got something going for me. I'm smart, I'm uber successful...I'm a hotshot publisher....but I'm lonely and dying for a good f....! A desperado on wheels.

Then the predator in the name of James Willoughby appeared---.snobbish, tanked and on the make for the waitress---in short order Isabel jumped him...like a cat in heat. The gigolo looks for desperados with few options to have an exciting high-wattage love life.(Think spinster overachiever) save if they subsidize it. The gigolo smells desperation...and sizes it up...like the salesman he is...and in return for his elegant keep offers dynamite sex and courtly attention, scintillating company and the semblance of a family, which is exactly what Isabel, who has never experienced the attentions of a man in such an intense way wants. But it costs in self worth and hard cash. And as she goes down in her own estimation he preys upon her even more. You do not make lunch out of a strong savvy person or one who has woken up.

The inane thing about this endless diatribe...is that Isabel never asks..the hard questions..to herself...i.e. what lacks were in her that drew her to such a damaged selfish man? From the beginning Isabel was the single mother...when Burgo was born..the only change was Isabel shouldered the responsibility for two children instead of one. She always knew she was being used...after twelve years...(how many kicks in the head does she need?? The sex must have been "hot".).if not..she needed more medication or perhaps a brain transplant. It's like former Beetle..Paul McCartney..saying ridiculous...my money was not a factor in my marriage to Heather. Who is he kidding?!!!It was a factor...but what McCartney hopes is there were other important factors,too. Like maybe love and caring.

When you've done something inexcusable and for a long time(you've invested so much of your energy and funds and to discover it was for naught..when the going got rough..and a better mark appeared he dumps you..but not after many fun trips to Paris and LA)...you only compound it by trying to justify it. There is no justification save Isabel was as desperate and fucked up as James, only in other ways. It takes two. She could not imagine snaring another man of James' albeit damaged caliber..given her own deficits. So she clung on for dear life until he fled.

There is something soft and weak about a man that preys on women (It is a man's world like it or not and they do have more money options. Check out Forbes 500. How many women do you see? ) And something even more disturbing about a mature woman who tries to justify her mothering and subsidizing a man far older than she who depleted her of resources and sense; instead of simply saying I was an ass...burying the evidence of her folly. Maybe she's trying to justify her behavior to all her NY friends who are laughing behind her back? Well, trust me, this won't help.

As a reader who can be quite persnickety when it comes to character development and authenticity, as well as plot line, I am delighted to have found this work by a newly published author. I'm disappointed that there aren't more works by Ms. Collinsworth -- I hope the future holds more from her. I enjoy sophisticated thrillers (tired of hard-smoking, hard-drinking crotchety detectives), and this delivered. It's my favorite among the last ten or so books i've read. I highly recommend it.

The initial paragraph is intriquing. Immediately you want to read this book. Character development was mixed. James and Isabel are polar opposites but the author convinces you that it is a plausible marriage......love conquers all. The child of the marriage (Burgo) is just too precocious and doesn't fit. The story holds your attention and is well written. Good style. The next book can only be better.

Eden Collinsworth clearly has a powerful literary background, for the two central characters of this highly readable novel could be spin-offs of Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Edith Wharton's characters in Ethan Frome, and any of the real people in the biography of Maxwell Anderson, a pivotal publishing giant. Spin-off is okay and works well herein, but why is Isabella so irksome?

The plot is plain to see as the reader wanders through the story wondering how the irresponsible dandy, James, will continue his wannabe aristocratic lifestyle in a meaningful marriage to Isabel. Love is supposedly blind but Isabel takes the cake for acceptance; many another woman would have "flown the coop" or attempted to murder James chapters before Isabel actually does both.

Still this is a fascinating book in showing the demise of two literate writer/editor personalities, naturally reaching for the stars and descending into their darkest psychological substance. Who recovers? You will be surprised for sure by the ending of this capricious couple who manage to nurture a very sane son in the midst of veritable chaos on several sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Fabulous, compelling read in one way but oddly devastating in outcome!

Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on November 24, 2006

This was a great, quick read and hard to put down. She makes the characters very dynamic and the dialogue can be witty and the character insights fascinating. However, at the end of it all, I was left thinking that it really was a novel about the ennui of the wealthy. If you enjoyed Falling In Love with Natassia you might enjoy this as well.

In New York twenty-eight years old acerbically witty workaholic Isabel Simpson runs Priam Books, a highly regarded and successful publishing company. James Willoughby is fixated on becoming wealthy as long as it does not require work that interferes with his expensive lifestyle. His articles for magazines and newspapers fit his need, but also come to the attention of Isabel, who realizes that he is a major talent if he put his mind and butt to it.

Isabel decides to meet James. When they do they are immediately attracted to one another though their outlooks on life are totally polar opposites in outlook and demeanor from one another. Now fifteen years later with a son Burgo, Isabel explains to a psychiatrist she cannot remember the motive for wanting to kill her spouse, James, but she is sure she had a good reason for smashing his head with an umbrella before pushing him into Paris traffic. She begins to look back at how their love metamorphosis into an attempted homicide.

Though the Python humor is amusing, it also takes away from a serious relationship drama in which Isabel reflects back on where did the love go. Readers will initially assume that James is innocent, but his selfish behavior over time erodes his spouse's sel-esteem until she cannot take anymore. Though she is wrong for resorting to violence, readers will understand what drove her to push this survivor into traffic in this modernization (without the biting satire sting) of How to Murder My Wife.

Harriet Klausner