Group Sex - Hardcover

Arensberg, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394553101 ISBN 13: 9780394553108

Publisher: Knopf, 1986

Synopsis

Frances Girard is no longer interested in her mundane job and increasingly boring life, and she sees Paul Treat, an eccentric young theatrical director, as an irresistible chance to leave it all behind

About this title

Reviews

To be blonde and beautiful and stupendously bright, to be carefree and in love, is every woman's dream; to be kind and giving into the bargain, may be her undoing. Young editor Frances Girard lives in an elegant apartment at the top of a handsome Manhattan brownstone, whose owner Madeline demands, besides the rent, backrubs and tea and sympathy, especially now when she is in thrall to Paul Treat, the director whose play she is financing. After he meets Frances, Paul very soon is making journeys upstairs, a situation that Frances can't stand and Madeline won't stand for. Frances moves out of the brownstone and into Paul's loft, where she serves as handmaiden, fall-girl and brunt-bearer to Paul and his hypochondria and mercurial moods, and eventually breadwinner until his latest play finds a backer. Frances rebels and the lovers part, but a reconciliation ends this sparkling romantic comedy. Comparable to Laurie Colwin's best work, this is a provocative mood change from Arensberg's stunning first novel, Sister Wolf.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Arensberg, whose Sister Wolf ( LJ 9/15/80) won the American Book Award for Best First Novel in 1981, has written a second novela "romantic comedy"part of which first appeared as a short story in the O. Henry Prize Collection of 1980. Her heroine, Frances Girard, is unqualifiedly a downtrodden doormat. Everyone takes advantage of Frances, not least her lover, Paul Treat, avant-garde theater director. Arensberg details their affair with humor and insight, but they remain essentially types: the unfailingly giving woman, the blindly taking man. It is not Paul's violation of her personality that finally makes Frances rebel but his sexual infidelity. Like all romantic comedies this one ends happily. For all its sophisticated wit and telling detail, the novel remains only clever, and like a conversation that drones on long after the point is made, becomes slightly boring. Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0394553101
• ISBN 13: 9780394553108
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 175