Amazon.com Review
New York writer Desmond Sullivan doesn't believe in marriage. His five happy years with his lover Russell haven't fundamentally challenged Desmond's conviction that, at best, true love is "an acute form of tolerance." He's sexually restless, and looking forward to his four-month teaching stint in Boston as an attempt to regain some of his own identity and try to complete the biography he's been writing. Jane Cody, a Boston public television producer, is similarly disenchanted with her marriage to a clumsy, kindly professor of English. Lately, Jane has been meeting her ex-husband Dale for drinks and coffee, although she's well aware that he's a jerk. With so much going wrong in her life, it strikes Jane that she and Desmond could collaborate on a series of documentaries, salvaging both of their foundering work lives. A page-turner, not by virtue of its plot, but because of Stephen McCauley's utterly engaging narrative voice,
True Enough reprises some of the themes of his earlier novel,
The Object of My Affection. It also has the virtues of a good Woody Allen film: Great comic lines and brilliant social observation among a small circle of successful friends. And like so much of Allen's work, the subject is married love: Fidelity and betrayal in their many guises. A funny, well-developed novel with surprising emotional depth.
--Regina Marler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
However insightful, this fourth novel (following The Man of the House) dissecting the self-centered, shallow social artifice and snobbery of the great American middle class fails by a whisper to achieve the exquisitely fine-edged satirical tone that distinguished the author's brilliant earlier work. In the case of literature remarkable for its droll voice and delightfully empathetic characters, any shortcoming (however infinitesimal) is tantamount to discovering a zircon in a Tiffany setting. At 40, Jane Cody, a fading Boston public TV producer, frets as her long-running TV talk show loses viewers. She and her precocious, belligerent six-year-old son are both secretly in therapy, and her rebound marriage to a bland professor at a small liberal arts college has lost its zest. When her best friend who married Jane's sexy, womanizing first husband asks Jane to confront her ex with the friend's suspicion he is cheating, Jane gives in to her rekindled attraction to the ex and enters into an affair. Meanwhile, obscure NYC biographer Desmond Sullivan, suffering writer's block and a restless discontent with his five-year monogamous cohabitation with his gay lover, is looking forward to a much-needed, soul-searching sabbatical provided by a semester teaching in Boston with Jane's spouse. Each seeking salvation by collaborating on a TV biography of a minor, long-forgotten pop singer of the '60s, Jane and Desmond travel to a seedy seaside town on the Florida panhandle for taping just before a late season tropical storm is due. A not-so-surprising turn of events provides an equally predictable resolution. Loyal readers will miss the dead-on timing of McCauley's earlier novels. His insight into the small self-delusions that support satisfied lives is, however, as sharp as ever. Agent, Denise Shannon of ICM. (June)Forecast: The author of The Object of My Affection has a franchise on wry, alternative-family dramas, and though his latest shows signs of strain, it should beckon to fans in search of light summer reading.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
