Iris Has Free Time
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy and riffing on Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Iris Has Free Time is a subtle, complicated, funny, bold, lyrical and literary book about youth, time, and what it means to grow up
“There, I came across a cluster of NYU graduates standing in cap and gown. They were laughing and posing for photos. Was it June again already? Their voices echoed through the subway tunnel. ‘Congratulations!’ ‘Congratulations!’ their parents said. And I wanted to yell, ‘Don’t do it! Go back! You don’t know what it’s like!’”
Whether passed out drunk at The New Yorker where she’s interning; assigning Cliffs Notes when hired to teach humanities at a local college; getting banned from a fleet of Greek Island ferries while on vacation, or trying to piece together the events of yet another puzzling blackout—“I prefer to call them pink-outs, because I’m a girl”—Iris is never short on misadventures. From quarter-life crisis to the shock of turning thirty, Iris Has Free Time charts a madcap, melancholic course through that curious age—one’s twenties—when childhood is over, supposedly. An instant classic and essential reading for anyone who has ever been young.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fresh out of N.Y.U., 20-something dilettante Iris Smyles feels destined for fame and fortune. After briefly considering movie stardom ("it couldn't be that hard"), she settles on writing, but finds nothing of meaning in her own life about which to write. As she waits for fate to smile upon her, Iris job hops, starting with a disastrous internship at the New Yorker's cartoon desk (a job chosen because she enjoys doodling, and to which she frequently shows up still drunk from the night before). Her stints as a teacher, T-shirt designer, and sex columnist are all hindered to various degrees by the predictable consequences of her hard-partying lifestyle and incessant navel-gazing. In between life-changing epiphanies, Iris summers in Greece, falls in love a few times, and enjoys an ever-revolving circle of friends. While Smyles writes clear prose, her story lacks a substantial character arc, made more obvious by a chronologically disjointed narrative. Newly hatched urbanites will certainly find common ground with Iris, and fans of cringeworthy humor might appreciate her moxie, but there's not much here for anybody else.
