Recent Subway Reading

In and out of Manhattan the last few days, I've been making my way through Francesca Delbanco's Ask Me Anything, in which Rosalie Preston, a young actress in New York, recounts her fling with the father of one of the other members of her small theater troupe, a group whose friendships date back to college. Carlin Romano at the Philadephia Enquirer praises the "controlled voice" of Delbanco's debut:

Like all gifted fiction writers, Delbanco knows how to pin attitude and gesture with a tight phrase, to drop insights without giving them drumroll treatment or ditching them too quickly for fear of seeming mannered.

Indeed; if I were to articulate my one major complaint with the novel, it's precisely that it does seem mannered, particularly in the dialogue. And while this makes Rose's patrician lover, the baroquely names Berglan Starker, humorously pompous, in most other places it strains the credibility of Rose and her friends as twentysomethings, even sophisticated Manhattanite twentysomethings. Fortunately, that weakness is offset by Delbanco's command of character and novelistic structure, so that even when the lines (or Rose's narration) are at their most arch, the situations are engrossingly plausible.

Ask Me Anything does, I have to admit, make me wonder if the only things standing between literary fiction and "chick lit" are a willingness to do just one more draft, a very good agent, or both. Don't get me wrong; this is a very solid debut, Delbanco's probably got a lot of even better writing ahead of her, and it's commendable that she got (according to the New York Observer) a "generous advance, but not some huge fat advance" from Norton, but you could just as easily imagine reading this as a trade paperback original from Avon or maybe even Red Dress (though in the latter case it would certainly stand out from the majority of its peers due to an extra layer of polish). And there's no necessary shame in the "chick lit" label, of course: Delbanco would be doing just fine if she does as well as, say, Jennifer Weiner.