Sleeping with Random Beasts

Eleanor May Shank - otherwise known as Bean - is fed up with her unfaithful boyfriend, numbing job, and nagging insecurities.
In a reckless move that abandons all hope of normalcy, she packs up her life in Boston and heads across the country by train. Balancing aimlessness with visits to ex-lovers, out-of-control friends, and her splintered family, she rapidly settles old scores and makes new mistakes. Until, quite unexpectedly, she discovers what she really wants and how to get it.

At 30, Eleanor May "Bean" Shank, the loquaciously cynical narrator of this meandering novel, decides to leave her alcoholic, cheating boyfriend and boring bank job behind. Tucked into her suitcase are a bottle of Scotch and a camera, her prerequisites for finding herself and becoming a photographer. Ahead lies a year-long cross-country odyssey during which she revisits the family and friends who shaped her dysfunctional past, taking on lovers as she finds them. Despite Goodwin's obvious intelligence, this fictional travelogue holds all the fascination of slides from someone's else's vacation, since Bean's unremittingly glib observations?that Connecticut teens are too well-groomed, that Richmond induces catatonia, that being gay in Kansas would be no day at the prairie?quickly lose their charm. Even worse are her constant references to her fluctuating weight. A case of arrested development, she whines instead of photographing, has sex in her mother's bed, stays stoned as often as possible. By the time one character advises, "Have some backbone! You're not thirteen anymore," the reader has already been there, thought that.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A first novel (``rescued from the slush pile,''we're told) with attitude to spare but nothing else: the story of a self- absorbed, self-destructive woman who screws up her life only to be saved by a good man. Like many of her contemporary literary peers, 30-year-old Eleanor Shank, commonly known as Bean, has a long list of people to blame for the mess she's in. Naturally, it begins with Mom, a promiscuous lush, and Dad, a surly authoritarian. Nothing really tragic has happened to Bean, but the scale of injury or awareness of a world beyond her navel is not important as she decides to find herself by leaving Boston and heading west. Bean's traveling light, but with lots of emotional baggage: She's just ended a long affair with an unfaithful alcoholic; she's never gotten over her parents' divorce or her stepfather's death; and along the way, she's also had two abortions. Bean takes a camera on the trip (she has vague ambitions of becoming a photographer) and, straining to be cool and witty, tells her own story with strident verve, alternating memories of the past with accounts of the actual journey and of the menall bad choicesshe's slept with. Her first stop is Richmond, Virginia, where she visits Dad, whom she blames for much of her unhappiness; then en route to Albuquerque she meets up with an old high-school crush, Joe, who's gay. In Tucson, she quarrels with her mother, who's sleeping with Ricky, Bean's old boyfriend. In El Paso, she moves in with Ash, who might be the father of the child she discovers she's carrying. Finally, she ends up in Oregon, helping Joe run his coffee shop while waiting for the baby's birth. A marriage proposal and a place to show her photos make up for all the previous messy living. A one-dimensional take on a terminally self-preoccupied woman. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Goodwin's Beasts reads like a Gen X Odyssey, of sorts. Our unlikely hero, Bean, aka Eleanor May Shank, navigates a twentysomething miasma of dead-end jobs, ambivalent friendships, quarrels with parents and siblings, drugs, alcohol, STDs, and random sex--lots of random sex, hence the title. Bean flees her dismal bank-teller job in Boston for parts unknown, hoping a respite from work will put her life in order, or at least help pad her photography portfolio. Her travels by train and bus lead her to her father (distressed over his daughter's aimlessness), old friends, her sister, and, finally, an attempted reconciliation with her estranged mother. Between confrontations and conversations, Bean sleeps with old boyfriends, acquaintances, and strange men she meets on the road. Goodwin characterizes many of the anxieties of the generation now sliding toward 30 without resorting to stereotypes and cliches. Perhaps a sign of Beast's success is the reader's constant desire to give Bean a kick in the butt and tell her to get a job. Ted Leventhal

Eleanor Shank ("Bean")?bright, 30, just out of a relationship with an unsatisfactory man, and bored with her job?dreams of becoming a photographer. So she quits her Boston job and embarks on a cross-country train trip that starts at her father's house, stops at the homes of her mother's friends, and ends up in Oregon. Along the way, she reveals her personal story: her insecure upbringing, her messed-up love life, and her sexual mistakes. Bean drinks too much, loves too easily (and not wisely), and doesn't know what she wants or why others behave as they do. The dialog in Goodwin's first novel is so real that it sometimes sounds like talking out loud. Bean lives and loves honestly and wants the world to do the same. At the book's end she is pregnant (and doesn't know who the father is) and living with the boyfriend (so she thought) of her youth. Bean is still expecting the silver lining, and the reader is left wondering, is this all there is? Recommended for larger public libraries.?Barbara Maslekoff, Ohioana Lib., Columbus, Ohio
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.