Love Trouble: New and Collected Work

In this collection of satirical pieces and short humorous fiction, Veronica Geng turns up hilarities large and small in government-speak, gender relations, academia, the mass media, love lives, restaurants, airplanes, and baseball fans. "Often," Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "her writing was the purest satire, in the sense that its preferred outcome would be for its object to fall down dead." Always attuned to the way things sound, Geng was a wicked parodist, a mimic of voices from Henry James to Chandler's private eyes, from LBJ to Pat Robertson. Love Trouble confirms Veronica Geng's place as one of our greatest humorists, who helped to carry the tradition of S.J. Perelman, James Thurber, and Robert Benchley to its illogical conclusion.

This collection of short satiric pieces comprises the oeuvre of the late Geng, a writer and editor for the New Yorker from 1976 to 1993. A compilation of two previously published collections, Partners and Love Trouble Is My Business, as well as newer work, this book confirms Geng as one of the most brilliant and encompassing satirists of the last few decades, providing readers unfamiliar with her writing with a concise volume of her caustic wit. Geng skewers the media, literature, sports and economics, but she's at her best when tackling political topics. From imagining the Nixon tapes as though they were a record being reviewed in the Village Voice to a Yankees trade of Bucky Dent for Republican Jack Kemp, Geng's pieces are wickedly smart, whimsically structured and multilayered. Taking a clipping or quote as inspiration, Geng free-associates to flesh out the contours of her signature diatribes. An interesting addition to the volume, as well as its one inconsistency, is an addendum tacked onto the end of each piece of Love Trouble Is My Business explaining its origin. Many of these function as self-consciously clear windows into Geng's thought processes and her friends' input (most notably, Ian Frazier, who also wrote the introduction), as well as hints of the climate of the New Yorker during the end of William Shawn's reign. The collected work of this master of "the epigrammatic genre" is a satisfying treat.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A grab-bag of work by the late New Yorker writer whose earlier volumes (Partners, 1984; Love Trouble Is My Business, 1988) are included here in their entirety, along with 16 previously uncollected pieces. Gengs writings are a good example of what was considered top-notch humor at the New Yorker during the last days of editor William Shawn, and they will serve to attract or repel readers along exactly the same lines that the magazine itself once did. Much of the work, it must be said, is more clever than funny, relying to a large degree on absurd juxtapositions (a hard-boiled detective who talks about Proust in Love Trouble Is My Business; an excruciatingly pompous wedding announcement relating the details of a marriage solemnized at the First Episcopal Church of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in Partners) or equally absurd historical events (George Bernard Shaw meeting Lyndon Johnson in Settling an Old Score). So much of the humor, in fact, relies on understanding just what is being satirized that many of the pieces are plainly incoherent to the uninitiated. My Dream Team, for instance, seems to be written either in the form of a police report, an EEOC complaint, or a passage from the Congressional Record. Anyone already a fan of Gengs will find plenty to enjoy here, but its unlikely to win her many new admirers. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Geng is essential to any roundup of literary U.S. humorists. An editor and writer for the New Yorker from 1976 to 1993, she satirized every aspect of life, from Washington politics to the court system, the arts, sex, and, of course, love and trouble. Well-read and witty, Geng took on as many personae on the page as a fashion model struts outfits on the runway, drawing on everything from her love of dance and fine writing, ala Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to girlhood memories and overheard conversations. In his introduction to this posthumous volume, which brings back into print two earlier collections and presents 15 new stories from various venues, including Harper's Magazine, Ian Frazier, friend and fellow traveler in the world of satire, gets it right: "Her writing is a party of influences." Only the most skilled and confident of writers can carry off the delicate art of parody--adopting the voices of others without losing their own--and Geng was a master. Donna Seaman

When Geng died in 1997, the literary world lost a great satirist. Geng's work appeared in The New Yorker from 1976 until 1993; this collection includes stories from her first two books, Partners (LJ 7/84) and Love Trouble Is My Business (1988), as well as 15 new pieces that skewer government, gender relations, romance, and academia, among other topics. Some are hilarious, while others are subtly obscure; this is sophisticated, cosmopolitan humor. "More Mathematical Diversions" describes a schoolgirl's game called Ortho, which "makes use of a perforated plastic case containing 21 disk-shaped counters." The player moves from a safe to unsafe position depending on her memory. "The game's centuries-old popularity is attested to in many historical references. The Phoenicians called it the Maze of Venus, and it was familiar to the Anglo-Saxons as a pastime called Preggers." A wicked, surreal look at life, best suited to larger public libraries and academic libraries.AKathy Ingels Helmond, Indianapolis- Marion Cty. P.L.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.