Ringing For You: A Love Story with Interruptions - Hardcover

Forrester, Anouchka Grose

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684862921 ISBN 13: 9780684862927

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

Synopsis

A frustrated secretary tries to fend off boredom at her job by writing a novel about her tempestuous love life, but she is blocked at every turn, by phone calls, arriving packages, and a new lover who insists on keeping their affair secret

About this title

About the Author

Anouchka Grose Forrester was born in Sydney, Australia, but has lived in London since the age of two. Her various vocations have included pop musician, jewelry designer, muralist, and lamp-shade maker. She is the author of two nonfiction books for teenagers and has held countless dull receptionist jobs.

Reviews

British-based Forrester's larky first novel shimmies through the life of a well-educated, overqualified temp receptionist as she juggles her boring job with her frustrating love life. The unnamed narrator says she "took a Masters degree in the History of Punishment," though she omits this achievement from her r?sum? for fear of scaring off employers. Temping at the tedious Academy of Material Science in London, she uses free time at her 9-to-5 desk job to write a novel about her floundering romantic life, in part to convince herself that she isn't turning into "horrible corporate vegetation." She blames such frequent interruptions as phone calls or package deliveriesAwhich are indicated throughout the text with whimsical textual iconsAfor preventing her from producing a cohesive narrative, and the result is an enjoyable jumble of neurotic journal entries, philosophical meandering and academic asides. Prone to panic attacks and narcoleptic fits, the rebellious and insecure narrator feels petulantly superior to her fellow drones. Explaining her abhorrence for office parties, she sniffs, "I don't want to see these people when they're drunk." Yet she also spends much of the novel obsessing over office hierarchy, as well as pondering the invention and social significance of the telephone, what books are and why people like them, and the meaning of extraordinary love and work versus the merely ordinary. Readers are likely to feel about Forrester's book the way her narrator describes her own reading material: skimming a contemporary American novel featuring a similar receptionist heroine, the spunky protagonist feels "jealous and then... bored" to find another angsty secretary to identify with, finding the manic pretensions a bit tedious, but appreciative of the "funny words and 'interesting' ways of saying things and witty (yet surprisingly 'deep') anecdotes." (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A witty transatlantic debut about the perils of a bright young woman trapped behind a switchboard at one of Londons more demented City offices. The take-this-job-and-shove-it genre is a favorite among young writers for a simple reason: Most have to pay the bills in some dreadful fashion during the long gray dawn before they are ever published. Forresters heroine, however, finishes her novel while she works a dreadful day job. Her novel is a journal really, though she cant quite put everything into it. Especially names. Like her own, for starters, and that of her boyfriend (who forbids her to mention him and is only referred to as the Man Who Mustnt be Mentioned, or MWMM). And she must mind what she says about the office itself; her father assures her that libel laws are quite strict in Britain. Although her real interest is literature, The Academy of Material Science in London hired her as a receptionist fresh out of university, and she does manage to get quite a bit of writing done at her desk despite the constant ringing of the phone and the endless parade of messengers dropping off packages. But she has little faith in herself, either as a writer or a personI ought to be able to transform my misery into something else through writing, but instead I just write about it and it stays the sameand most of the time her affair with the MWMM seems as pointless to her as her manuscript does. Is she deluded? Or just inexperienced? Eventually, she concludes that the beginning of love is a story, the end of love is a story, but before the end the middle might mean anything. Something plenty of married couples and successful authors take a lifetime to discover. Candid, fresh, and likable: Forresters naturalistic tone and elegant voice more than compensate for her slightlyand endearinglyaimless narrative. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Laugh-out-loud moments abound in this comic first novel about an overeducated young woman who takes a temporary job as a receptionist for a London nonprofit organization. She scribbles away at a novel during the four months she spends sitting idle, between answering the phone and signing for packages. Forrester's use of icons to denote telephone, human, and postal interruptions to the heroine's writing is a clever gimmickAwhich she has the sense to discontinue after the novelty wears off. Dickensian observations of co-workers and their habits of dress, speech, status-seeking, and sex are as dryly wicked as only an "invisible" employee can make them. Office parties have become a literary clich?, but the one in this book is nearly as funny as the real event of the office yearAthe visit of the Queen's husband. The threads of the heroine's romantic life are more confusing and far less successfully woven into the narrative. You'll watch your step around receptionists after reading this. Recommended for larger collections.AJoyce W. Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, NJ
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

All About Me

I'll tell you the main thing you need to know about me, after which everything else will be subsidiary. This is the lens through which you'll need to look to understand all my actions. I've always been someone who would probably describe themself as happy. But equally I've always gone around with a strong sense of something being badly missing. I think I'm pretty normal in this respect. For me the missing bit has always seemed rather overpowering and ruined a lot of stuff that wasn't necessarily deserving of ruination (especially romantic stuff). However, as a feeling, I can say with a huge amount of certainty that I'd rather not be without it. It's sort of like the glitter on a Christmas card -- the picture would be pretty average without it, but the glitter comes along and makes it look special.

Just for the sake of giving it some sort of historical dignity, I'll tell you how I think this feeling got there in the first place. It had always been around, but nothing had really forced me to recognize it until one day, at the age of seventeen, I found myself reading a slightly tedious book about child development. It had a chapter on parental disappearance and its effects on the infant (based on the theories of a man called John Bowlby which, so it said, anyone in their right mind agrees are largely crap). The effects were divided into three stages: initially the child would be sad, angry and sorry for itself and wonder what it had done wrong (the first five days or so), then it would be miserable for a bit but cry a lot less and not so convincingly, and finally (in the space of a fortnight) it would become really cheerful, although obviously detached, and start forming easy relationships with whoever was around. The child's character would be formed according to which stage of desolation the baby was in on the parents' return. The theory applies to children up to the age of five, after which they can supposedly sort out their problems without too much trouble. The whole process took two weeks, meaning that a child abandoned for a fortnight would be capable of fantastic feats of overcoming pain and upset -- while not actually overcoming them at all. In other words, it would learn how to behave as if nothing was wrong in situations where it quite clearly was. It would detach itself from the agony while remaining agonized by the detachment. And, as if that weren't enough, on the parents' return, after a period of clinging, dependent behaviour, it would become 'attention seeking, uninhibited, indiscriminately friendly' and quickly develop (in the words of a Mr M. Rutter) 'a personality characterized by lack of guilt, an inability to keep to rules and an inability to form lasting relationships'. Something in the description struck a chord with me (a whole Beatles songbook actually) but as far as I knew I had no history of abandonment, so I decided to put the experience down to the rampant identifications one is bound to undergo when reading psychology books.

Still, this particular account seemed to have more potency than all the other empathies I suffered at the time, and I began to wonder whether the same effects could be rendered by a different set of circumstances (like Capricorns who, on reading all the other -- more appropriate -- horoscopes, start to ask whether they have Scorpio rising or the moon in Leo).

Ages later, when searching through an old photo album and grappling with the unbelievable notion that I was once a baby -- that baby, even, in that picture, with the Pekinese hairstyle and smock -- I stumbled across a postcard. The front was quite repellent and I felt no particular urge to read it. It just didn't look very interesting. It didn't seem up to the task of diverting my gaze away from the infinitely more captivating photographs of me. It was white with a blue cod-Victorian swirly border framing the words 'Defense d'Uriner' in large black curling letters. Don't ask how, but something about it nonetheless must have caught my attention. It sort of by-passed my normal decision-making faculties and got permission from a higher authority. It caught me unawares and I found myself switched imperceptibly from uninterested to irrevocably mesmerized. The more I looked at it the more its cringing miserableness took on an ineffable power. Steadily, inscrutably, it became more and more repulsive until I realized I was going to have to read it. The back was covered with my mother's scrawly writing. I scanned it quickly to see what it was and where it was from and was appalled to see that it was addressed to 'Darling...' -- my name! and shamelessly proclaimed 'Happy First Birthday!'.

The other day on the news there was a feature about a postcard that took eighty years to reach its destination. Apparently it fell behind a filing cabinet at the post office in 1916 and had to wait until the building was refurbished in 1996 to complete the final leg of its journey. The intended recipients had long since died and the new homeowners were somewhat surprised. Naturally they saw the funny side and didn't feel too spooked. When my postcard finally arrived, however, I was outraged. It was a first birthday card from my mother in Barbados, sent to me in London, where I was busy being shunted back and forth between my two grannies.

She'd abandoned me and never mentioned it and all the stuff in the psychology book was exactly right. I was arrested for shoplifting shortly before receiving the card, and, in accordance with the prediction, found it very hard to act guilty at the police station. Why would I feel bad? I was simply a half-grown-up abandoned baby acting out the effects of my early trauma in the designated manner. I had also been booted out of school for my attention-seeking hairstyle and had developed a serious compulsion to befriend tramps, public schoolboys, prostitutes, ageing architects, lost tourists, blind people and anyone else who crossed my path. They would fail to understand that my friendliness was merely the product of a bad day I'd had a number of years back and didn't actually mean I liked them. They would ring me or buzz the entryphone at my family home only to be told, by me or my well-practised parents, that I no longer lived there. However, far from being an out-of-control teenager, I was behaving in absolute obedience to the rules laid out before me at the tender age of one. And at last, already having become the thing I was destined to turn into, I found myself confronted by the object that announced my fate. My parents had gone on holiday for a month, missed my first birthday, and sent me a card forbidding me to pee.

I just have to interrupt this heartrending account of childhood trauma to say that by a miracle of space/time transformation, in the time it took you to pass from the last sentence to this one (a hundredth of a second?) a whole day has elapsed for me.

All this might not sound like much of a big deal to you, but you have to understand that for me, having lived with the effects of my parents' month-long disappearance for twenty or so years, it was quite a discovery. My 'character' no longer seemed to me an indistinct mass of uneasy combinations, but a perfectly functioning mechanism doing quite flawlessly what it had been programmed to do. I asked my mother about it and she was quite surprised that I attached so much significance to the event. She said she'd never told me because she didn't think it mattered. When I pushed the point she got all shirty and said she'd never planned that my first birthday would be on the fourth of February. What a dodgy argument. My mum is nice, but we're very alike. I sort of suspect that her mum and dad might have done a similar thing to her, which would explain why she refuses to feel guilty about it. At least my dad got quite remorseful when I asked him and

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684862921
• ISBN 13: 9780684862927
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208