A postmodern romance from the author of Separate Hours and The Life and Times of Major Fiction.
--This text refers to the
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Framed as a mystery from the outer reaches of reality, Baumbach's 10th novel opens with Jack, the hero of Reruns , obsessed with discovering which of his former wives wishes him dead. Sequestered in his New York City apartment, he performs a surreal post-mortem of his seven marriages to alternately dependent or emasculating women, creating seven witty, cynical reminiscences about the failure of post-modern relationships and the dark underside of the American dream. Baumbach's flair for bleak situations and wicked satire serves him well. Jack's biting accounts of his first love's infidelity and talent for rationalization, his third wife's uncanny resemblance to his mother, his fifth wife's anxious voyeurism and overwhelming weight, provide ample opportunity to exploit the full range of his characters' existential pretensions as Jack spirals further and further away from the perfect union. Yet for all its dry, urban malaise, the stories never cohere. Too much is sacrificed for the dark hopelessness of Jack's quest for ideal love; taken as a whole, the seven episodes fall short of the emotional resonance for which they aim. The ending, intended to assuage our narrator and to redeem the late-20th century's anguished soul, fails to rise above the heavy-handed cynicism of the earlier pages.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
If the mind were to dwell for too long on the ambivalence of love and relationships, one could end up inhabiting the nightmare world of Baumbach's latest novel. Here, the libido is as dangerous as crack, and nothing that anyone says can be believed. Baumbach's protagonist is Jack, husband to the "seven wives" of the title, and the plot turns on all the love skeletons he has in his closet. Baumbach (Chez Charlotte and Emily, LJ 11/1/79) makes matters worse for him by painting the kinds of watery backdrops one finds in mandarin metafiction, e.g., cleverness-for-its-own-sake stuff. This is the opposite of historical fiction; Baumbach just grabs pieces of reality out of the pedestrian consciousness. His style lends itself well to settings of paranoid American noir, a miasma of sunglasses, pistols, and deadpan. For readers who enjoy that ilk, Baumbach delivers a nice, dark magic show.
Brian Geary, West Seneca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Brian Geary, West Seneca, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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