In the Drink: A Novel - Softcover

Christensen, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385720211 ISBN 13: 9780385720212

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2000

Synopsis

In this compassionate, wise, and comical debut, Kate Christensen gives an engaging and authentic voice to a new generation of single urban women.

Claudia Steiner never intended for her life to become such a disaster.  At the age of twenty-nine she finds herself serving as secretary to an insane, aging socialite who barks orders from her toilet, specializes in devastating backhanded remarks, and expects Claudia to ghostwrite her best-selling novels. Her job pays enough to keep her in overpriced cocktails, cabs, and take-out but doesn't cover the rent on her roach-infested apartment or keep her creditors at bay. Her romantic prospects are no better. She's hopelessly in love with her best friend, a corporate lawyer who may or may not be gay, and she's still relentlessly pursued by her ex-lover, a married unpublished epic poet. All Claudia can rely on--aside from her wry sense of humor and her faith in the medicinal properties of whiskey--is a persistent little flame of belief in herself, which gives her the glimmer of a chance for a happy ending.

About this title

Review:

Bridget Jones's Diary seems to have unleashed a flood of similar novels featuring unmarried, underemployed, somewhat neurotic young women searching for the right job--and, more importantly, the right man. One of the better entries in the Bridget Jones Sweepstakes is Kate Christensen's In the Drink, which features a 29-year-old New Yorker. Claudia Steiner long ago traded in her initial dream of making it big in journalism for a position as personal secretary and ghostwriter for Genevieve "Jackie" del Castellano, an elderly writer of bestselling novels and a lunatic to boot. In addition to her employment woes, Claudia has an unsatisfactory love life: her lover is married, and the man she loves just wants to be friends. Helen Fielding played these miseries for comedy; Christensen, however, takes her character--and her readers--down a darker path. Where Bridget would get tipsy in a pub with her girlfriends, Claudia prefers to drink alone. Still, though Claudia's tribulations mount--she loses her job, she can't pay the rent, she makes a pass at her best friend and secret crush, William, and gets rebuffed--Christensen manages to keep the tone hopeful even as she refuses to pull her punches. When, for example, an acquaintance calls her a drunk, Claudia thinks:

A drunk was someone to be reckoned with, someone interesting and far-gone. I should have been alarmed and ashamed, should have considered joining all those chain-smokers in church basements--I knew what I was supposed to feel. But the sunlight covered the street with the clear healthy gold of ale, the brownstone faces were burnished the toast-warm color of bourbon in candlelight, the air was clear and lively as gin, and something leapt in me, a persistent little flame of self.

In the Drink is not a Cinderella story, after all--nor even a retelling of a Jane Austen classic--but Christensen ends her debut on a hopeful note without giving its heroine a complete makeover. And in Claudia she has created a character who is endearing because of her flaws, not in spite of them. --Alix Wilber

From the Back Cover:

"At a time when authors are penning best-selling memoirs about their alcoholic torment, and 12-step programs are as popular as SUVs, Christensen's take is refreshing."--The New York Post

"[T]he freshest anti-heroine I've read in a long time. This is no depressing drunk-noir; it's a great description of real life--the good, the manageable, and the awful."--Jane

"[A] breezy and confident first novel."--The New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0385720211
• ISBN 13: 9780385720212
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288