Bad Timing
A Novel
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- USD 4.99
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- USD 4.99
Descripción editorial
“The value of Bad Timing as a cultural portrait, its subversiveness, is not in what it criticizes, but in what it celebrates—the pride of losers, the volatility of deep friendships between women, the tribal bonds between blacks and Jews, and especially love of family. This is a hilarious, venomous first novel.”—Darryl Pinckney
The unnamed narrator is an artist, a single woman in her late thirties. The man she meets at a downtown club is a jazz musician, older—and married. Their attraction is instinctive, irrational, and profound—and complicated by the fact that she becomes pregnant after their first night together. Bad Timing is the story of their affair, which unfolds over one steamy summer in the dreamy enclaves of lower Manhattan.
Under the erratic tutelage of her black, gay neighbor, her stentorian Jewish mother, and a circle of eccentric friends (who provide fuel as much for neurosis as for comfort), this unconventional woman struggles to reconcile her need for love with the limits and liberties of an undercover affair. Her story is filled with head-on confrontations with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, morals, and family—by turns bitingly funny and genuinely heartbreaking.
Set in an all-too-small New York universe of artists, musicians, and writers in which the lives of our hapless heroine and her errant lover intersect repeatedly with far fewer than six degrees of separation, Bad Timing memorably depicts a woman seeking to find love and balance in a world where men and women are equally complicit in games of emotional hide-and-seek, and where culture has become little more than merchandise and personalities. With devilish insights into the clubby worlds of art and magazines, Bad Timing is a tart-yet-sweet story of modern love, lost and found.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An unnamed 30-something Manhattan woman embarks on a hopeless not-quite-love affair in this Sex and the City-style fiction debut. Tipsy at "a trashy magazine party at a trashy new bar," the narrator is mesmerized by handsome Joseph Pendleton, a black jazz club owner, and dives into a one-night stand. A month later, she has mixed feelings when she finds herself pregnant by this married man. On the one hand, she wants a baby; on the other, as a struggling painter and magazine writer, she's not confident she can support a child. When she informs Joseph of her decision to terminate the pregnancy, their affair begins again with renewed vigor. While navigating the glossy magazine and gallery scene, the lovers do their best to figure out what, exactly, their commitment to each other should or could be. The result is a tangled and often painfully adolescent relationship, with the couple garrulously engaging in standard therapeutic-speak. The supporting characters are all stock New YorkersDthe flamboyant gay neighbor, the overbearing Jewish mother, the superficial beauty editor. Caustic racial asides are casually sprinkled throughout, but the relationship's racial dimension is never seriously addressed. This is a 21st-century love story, a typically urban tale in which love, in the classic sense of the word, is beside the point. Berne, herself a painter who has written for glossy magazines, brings a journalist's eye to her novel; every excruciating detail of a dead-end relationship is recorded. Some hip, urban female readers may identify despite themselves, but the uninflected, navel-gazing narrative lacks the energy to ring many bells.
