Jane Hamilton has written a funny book with Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, chock full of great one-liners (and one-paragraphers) about the times we live in, especially if we are white and in our forties and on solid economic ground. What do we find for excitement? Anything! We range from gardening and cooking to email seduction and alien contact, whatever makes us feel good and alive. Online seduction leading to in flagrante delicto is Laura Rider’s masterpiece, and losing weight is just the added benefit (news any forty-plus person can use). Hamilton offers this warning, however: there is no privacy in this contemporary age, and whatever you do, can and may be used against you in a romance novel.
Laura Rider gives up sex with her husband: “after twelve years of marriage, Laura had become permanently tired of his enthusiasm. She’d realized if you gave an inch you were in for the mile, that even if you were occasionally available, he’d assume the welcome mat was always on the stoop….[but]… just as a horse has a finite number of jumps in her, so Laura had used up her quota.” With all the free time on her hands, Laura pursues her new love, writing (how hard can it be?) and decides she will write a romance novel. But first research must be done.
When Laura’s idol moves to town, talk show host Jenna Fragoli, Laura realizes that her adorable and durable husband Charlie and the calm and smart Jenna could serve as the prototypes for her novel. And so begins a modern farce of on-line seduction, followed by capitulation and copulation, and then all the rest of the mess that comes with having sex. After years of marriage, we forty-plussers tend to forget about the mess, but it’s there and Hamilton makes it all really funny.
Although the book is good fun, there is a streak of nastiness that is jarring. Much as Laura is the puppet master of her husband and Jenna, Jane Hamilton is the master of her characters — of course, she is the writer — but in being master, she makes her characters slaves, preventing their realness and their humanity from materializing. I was rooting for some of them, wishing I could will them out of the constrictions Hamilton places them in: I wanted to offer them the chance to find happiness, fulfillment, and no hard feelings anywhere. Alas, Hamilton is wedded too firmly to her notion of farce, and does not allow her characters to become real, living human beings, and that is the flaw of the book. Or maybe it is just my flaw, wanting to see couples happy, sex satisfying, and emails private.
