Urban Bliss - Hardcover

Eidus, Janice

3.3

30 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880641592 ISBN 13: 9780880641593

Publisher: Fromm Intl, 1994

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Babette Bliss, a theater administrator, takes a leave of absence to work out personal problems concerning her philandering husband and her future

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From the Back Cover:

Babette Bliss, the decidedly modern heroine of this comical novel, suffers from an unsettling problem: ambivalence. She has taken leave from her job with an avant-garde New York theater to face her dilemmas concerning marriage, career, and soul. Should she forgive her philandering husband, George Harrison, a lawyer with an uncanny resemblance to Babette's favorite Beatle? Is it time, in fact, for her and George to have a baby? Or should she have an affair? She is thrown into even deeper confusion when her leather-clad therapist decides to give up her practice to become a rock star. No matter where Babette looks, abandonment is everywhere. So can she really desert her theater, at a time when the company is faced with eviction? To sort things out, she decides to live by herself again - only to team up with an unexpected roommate. Filled with subtle irony and insight, Urban Bliss is a humorous and touching novel that takes up age-old problems and sheds a '90s light on them.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The author of Vito Loves Geraldine (1990) serves up her trademark: frothy fiction that plays off of up-to-the-minute cultural phenomena and the weird normalcy of New York City. Babette Bliss has taken the summer off from her job as associate director of an avant-garde theater. Her boss, Jay (the only other staff member), who is dating her sister Maya (a decorator specializing in pink interiors), wants Babette to come back and help him fight a construction company that wants to tear down the theater to build condominiums. Babette has other things on her mind, however--mainly her suspicion that husband George Harrison (who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Beatle of the same name) is sleeping with a lawyer at his firm. Babette's therapist, Shara-Rose--who moonlights as the singer in a rock band called Mild Neurosis--is trying to help her through all of this. The jokes here are generally funny, although occasionally Eidus drives them home a little too hard, as though she's afraid the reader won't get them without help. Plot points, on the other hand, are rarely carried through completely, nor does Babette ever go all the way in any sense. She moves out on George, stays in the apartment of a performance artist friend who is on tour, and toys with the idea of having an affair with a playwright who is also living there--and happens to have just broken up with Jay's ex- wife. (All is incestuous in this novel.) She considers leaving her job at the theater but feels threatened when a summer intern is hired. There is a resolution of sorts, but one that leaves most of Babette's decisions still up in the air. Very light entertainment, but likely to amuse the class it portrays. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.