Office Girl
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This quirky tale of two young artists in love in 1990s Chicago is “a gorgeous little indie romance . . . A sweetheart of a novel” (Kirkus Reviews).
In the last year of the twentieth century, Odile is a lovely twenty-three-year-old art-school dropout, a minor vandal, and a hopeless dreamer. Jack is a twenty-five-year-old shirker who’s most happy capturing the endless noises of the city on his out-of-date tape recorder. Together they decide to start their own art movement, in defiance of a contemporary culture made dull by both the tedious and the obvious. Set just before the end of one world and the beginning of another, this is the story of two people trying to capture a moment in the face of an uncertain future.
Named a Best Book of the Year by Daily Candy and chosen as a favorite fiction work of the year in The Believer’s readers’ poll, Office Girl “reads as a parody of art-school types . . . and as a tribute to their devil-may-care spirit” (The New York Times Book Review).
“Mr. Meno excels at capturing the way that budding love can make two people feel brave and freshly alive to their surroundings . . . The story of the relationship has a sweet simplicity.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Meno’s tender, hip, funny, and imaginative portrayal of two Chicago misfits . . . dramatizes that anguished and awkward passage between legal age and actual adulthood.” —Booklist
Features black-and-white illustrations by artist Cody Hudson and photographs by Todd Baxter.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Joe Meno's new novel, set in the last year of the 20th century, art school dropout Odile Neff and amateur sound artist Jack Blevins work deadening office jobs; gush about indie rock, French film, and obscure comic book artists; and gradually start a relationship that doubles as an art movement. They are, in other words, the 20-something doyens of pop culture and their tale of promiscuous roommates, on-again/off-again exes, and awkward sex is punctuated on the page by cute little doodles, black and white photographs (of, say, a topless woman in a Stormtrooper mask), and monologues that could easily pass for Belle & Sebastian lyrics ("It doesn't pay to be a dreamer because all they really want you to do is answer the phone"). If the reader doesn't recognize the territory being mined by the time Jack and Odile begin covering their neighborhood in cryptic graffiti credited "ALPHONSE F." Meno (Hairstyles of the Damned) equips the book with two alternate titles Bohemians and Young People on Bicycles Doing Troubling Things that ought to straighten things out. High on quirk and hipster cred, the novel is light as air, surprisingly unpretentious, and extremely kind to its larky, irony-addled protagonists. Meno is really the heir to Douglas Coupland, who introduced this crowd in 1991's Generation X. However, Meno's sympathy for his heroes' frustrations makes his novel more than merely endearing.
