Book Review | A wit whose novel went awry, beginning with a dreadful title

By Patricia Marx

Scribner. 232 pp. $24

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Reviewed by Karen Heller

'Tis a gift to be clever, and Patricia Marx is exceptionally clever. She is clever on virtually every page, resulting in so much dog-earing that the devoured novel expands to twice the size.

Clever, though, is hard to execute in more than brief bursts. It's the humor of sprinters. Hence the reason Saturday Night Live (where Marx once wrote) and humor publications like the Harvard Lampoon (ditto) are sporadically successful. It's also why, alas, this novel isn't as good as its intentions.

To wit, the title. It's dreadful and tedious. And suggests that, despite her protean gifts as a writer, Marx is bullheaded, because no one successfully persuaded her to change the thing. I'm not even sure whether the book is Him Her Him Again The End of Him, or Him Her Him Again The End of Him. But who cares? If brevity is the soul of wit, why didn't Marx simply go with Him?

Him is Eugene Obello, a supercilious prig and improbable lothario whom the unnamed narrator meets while they're studying in Cambridge (England). Actually, the narrator isn't studying at all. She's changing her thesis subject as frequently as her socks, receiving therapy from friends (she tells everyone everything), entreating her parents for money, and hopelessly mooning for dastardly Eugene.

A graduate student from Princeton with a grant in Ego Studies, Eugene is given to saying "Your kisses are so recondite, my peach, that they are almost notional." The heroine eats this up. "He was a narcissist. I love narcissists - even more than they love themselves. You don't have to buoy them up. They are their own razzle-dazzle show and you are blessed, favored with a front-row seat."

Hand it to Marx. Him is possibly the only book to contain a joke about William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. (Elliot Perlman's massive 2004 novel purloined the title but isn't funny.) " 'Don't you think a better title would be Seven or Eight Types of Ambiguity?' I said. I needed Eugene to think I was clever, too."

The narrator hails from Abington, periodically returning to moon about Eugene, cadge more funds from the folks, mull what to do with the mess of her life, and indulge in one of humor's oldest sports, making fun of Philadelphia.

Several sentences after "I returned to England from my summer holiday in Philadelphia," the narrator notes "I forgot to ask: When was the last time you heard the words 'holiday' and 'Philadelphia' in the same sentence?" We already have Joe Queenan for this.

And that's the problem with Him, well, besides him, who is dislikable from the start and never changes, a train wreck that the narrator won't quit even after Eugene gets married and has a child. The novel is too self-aware of its own artful creation. Clever devolves into cute with faux postcards, appendices (including a flip Q&A with the author based on those patronizing exercises for book groups), and an ersatz lawyer's letter with suggested publisher's changes. There's a forced homage to Howards End, possibly the most sampled work in contemporary fiction now that writers have stopped ascribing their gifts to Henry James.

The plot - such as there is - never progresses, much like the narrator's stunted experience. There's a plethora of plot-impaired novels being published, cobbled together through a quilt of observations, strange characters or, in the case of Him, a succession of clever comments and aperçus. I so wanted to love Him, even if it was impossible to like the odious him. Here's hoping there is another book from Marx soon, one that offers a story and characters (and a title) that match her abundant talent.