Bar Maid
A Novel
-
- 20,99 €
-
- 20,99 €
Publisher Description
Now a USA Today Bestseller! A sparkingly witty, poignant debut novel that is a Bright Lights, Big City for a post-Reagan, pre-Y2K Philadelphia—for readers of Normal People, Sweetbitter, Modern Lovers, and Less.
It’s September 1987. Charlie Green is an eighteen-year-old romantic and aspiring alcoholic, whose great wish is to fall in love with a light-eyed girl on his first day of college and never look back. Charlie believes in the magic of bars and girls. He believes he can use these talismans to finally feel at home, an assurance his dim and privileged childhood did not provide. At the Sansom Street Oyster House, he meets Paula Henderson, a beautiful and deceptively soulful waitress who is the most overqualified bar maid in all the city—and perhaps the most alluring.
But there are obstacles in the Philly night between Charlie and his full heart. Drunks, louts, boyfriends—heroes too. And in Paula’s eyes, Charlie becomes one. When she takes him home to New Hope, PA, to meet her very Catholic mother, the young couple must contend with the consequences of their pure love.
In this darkly comedic coming-of-age novel, Charlie Green needs to grow up fast. At stake is his soul.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright Roberts debuts with an unpleasant novel about a world-weary college kid's fixation on idealized love. Immature and prematurely jaded Charlie Green dreams of falling in love on his first day at Penn in 1987 and dropping out. Armed with his older brother's dubious advice ("You don't want to come across as rich. That's a huge detriment in college") and his New York City family's money, he visits a down-at-the-heels oyster joint in Philadelphia and becomes infatuated with bartender Paula Henderson, 19. The next day, Charlie gets in a fight over Paula with her older boyfriend and narrowly wins. In the fallout, Paula decides to quit her job and head back to her hometown. A few months later, a shotgun wedding and impulsive honeymoon to Paris test the couple, and a miscarriage sows more doubts about the relationship. Charlie romanticizes Paula's comparatively humble experience ("She's between jobs. She goes to life," he tells his mom), but Roberts fails to characterize her or the other female characters with any dimension. He also includes a glut of sophomoric jokes straight from one of the decade's forgotten campus comedies (latex gloves are called "AIDS gloves," Charlie wonders if a girl in a wheelchair is able to have sex), which doesn't help. This attempt at portraying a precocious young man falls flat.
