Before heading off to Europe this summer, I visited Half-Price Books to pick up some beach reads (ha, not that I spent much time on the beach). I had long heard about Good in Bed - mostly that it represented the best of chick-lit - and thought it might provide some easy entertainment as I made my way through half-lit hostels. Ugh - how wrong I was. I hated this book; in fact, I think it represents all that is wrong with the genre, a genre which I now pledge to stop reading (really, I promise).Ostensibly, Good in Bed is about the protagonist's body issues. Cannie is a 28-year-old newspaper reporter who essentially loses her shit when her newly ex-boyfriend writes a magazine column about her entitled "Loving a Larger Woman." Even though Bruce is kind of a loser/creep, she decides that she wants him back and spends the next hundred pages obsessing. But then, on page 164, a surprise arrives and then the rest of the book veers off into something else (which I won't spoil)...and to somewhere else, an imaginary place called Never Never Land where screenplays magically get sold in an afternoon. I know chick lit generally contains fantastical elements but Good in Bed really went overboard - and it was eye-rolling because the characters were one-dimensional and Cannie barely agonized over/worked for any of her big decisions or accomplishments. The moral of the story seemed to be *whine a lot, get a lot* and it really pissed me off.
Before I let this one go, though, I do have to point out an error that really cracked me up. On page 26, Weiner writes, in Cannie's voice, "I felt scalded by shame, like I was wearing a giant crimson C..." But following the reference to The Scarlet Letter, Cannie wouldn't wear a C, because the letter isn't meant to represent her first name. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic - which I was forced to read twice in high school - the letter is an A, to represent the sin of adultery, not adultress Hester Prynne's first name. Clearly I really was meant to be an English teacher.
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