Love Creeps
A Novel
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York love story that’s “part suspense comedy and part philosophical treatise on the neurosis of love” from the author of Nude Men (Bret Easton Ellis).
At thirty-two years old, Lynn Gallagher is one of the five most influential contemporary-art gallery owners in Manhattan. Too bad her face is dead. Not so, says Lynn’s assistant, but that is how it feels when she compares it to her stalker’s face. Alan Morton may be a plump, goofy-looking accountant, but his face glows with life when he peers at Lynn through her gallery window. The difference is that Alan wants something—her—very badly, while Lynn wants nothing at all.
So she decides to stalk.
The object of her obsession—French attorney Roland Dupont—is chosen at random in a Chelsea bakery. He is attractive, but it is not until he expresses his disinterest in her that Lynn begins to truly desire him. Alan, jealous of Lynn’s newfound hobby, befriends Roland to find out what she sees in him. When Roland learns that he acquired his stalker by happenstance, he decides that he might be interested in Lynn after all. Soon all three are brazenly pursuing each other across the city—from adult education classes in the art of beading to meetings of Stalker’s Anonymous—as they try to figure out what it is that they truly want. The advice of Ray, the homeless psychologist who observes their madcap comings and goings, is not much help at all: “Take a break, an antidepressant. Get hold of yourselves.”
A hip and darkly humorous novel about the mysteries of romance, Love Creeps is pure Amanda Filipacchi—funny, wicked, and wise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elegant and accomplished but inexplicably passionless, New York contemporary art gallery owner Lynn Gallagher pursues a counterintuitive cure for her ennui in Filipacchi's (Nude Men) brisk but schematic novel. Inspired by the yearning of the man (pudgy, balding accountant Alan Morton) stalking her, Lynn seeks to regain what he seems to have but she lacks: desire. "Various men. Travel. Discovering new artists.... hearing updates on my friends' lives. I used to feel really passionate about all these things," Lynn tells her assistant. In the hopes that the act of pursuit will generate desire, Lynn arbitrarily selects a man to tail, the handsome French attorney Roland Dupont. Alan, in turn, observes the competition, joins Roland's gym and starts a reluctant friendship with his rival. Meanwhile, Roland's aversion to Lynn turns to attraction once he learns her stalking is spurious. Observing all these antics is bewildered Ray, psychologist turned homeless person, who dispenses advice (and occasionally abuse) to the determined troika. The story unfurls swiftly with amusingly sober discussions of ridiculous topics, amounting to a whimsical look at the connections we make and the desires that drive us.
