Beautiful Bodies
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Manhattan, the coldest night of the year -- six best friends rush to attend a celebration. Blown by wind and snow, the women arrive flushed, each caught in midadventure....
Tonight's the night of nights -- to rejoice in a new lover, leave an unfaithful husband, or decide to have a baby on one's own. These "six in the city" profes-sional women fight for their female choices. Sparks and zingers fly across the table....Love lives, secrets, and friendships go up in candle flame.
Who will win -- the romantics or the realists? How can working women triumph in such trying times? While the cell phones chime and the biological clocks rewind, the friends enact a timeless ceremony. Here is our urban "friends-as-family" generation -- Beautiful Bodies is a dazzling comedy of manners in the grand tradition of Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Cunningham's lively and amusing first novel, six women who have been friends for two decades gather together on the snowiest night of the year. All are on the cusp of 40; none has quite attained the aspirations she shared with her friends at 20. The party takes place at the downtown loft of journalist Jessie Girard, who may or may not have just met her soul mate, Native American lawyer Jesse Dark, and the occasion is a baby shower for unwed bohemian musician Claire Molinaro. The irony clear to all the women (who include Sue Carol, a still-aspiring actress, Lisbeth, a spaced-out painter and Nina, an overweight spa owner) is that Claire may be the only one who will fulfill their dreams of motherhood. Suspense gets built around three small but effective questions: will Jesse call Jessie tonight, as he promised? Will manipulative, materialistic Martha leave early to meet her lover at an expensive restaurant? Will the storm of the century destroy everybody's plans? Though the novel lacks the verve and surprising pathos of Cunningham's fine memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country, the plot hums along spiritedly. Cunningham is overzealous, however, in detailing the possessions and tastes that indicate her protagonists' status, and her focus on describing numerous Manhattan neighborhoods contributes to the feeling of a book done by the numbers. On the plus side, the dialogue is witty and quintessentially feminine, the atmosphere changes as each character alters the group dynamics, and Cunningham's observant and funny social comedy carries the ring of truth.
