Urban Bliss

by Janice Eidus

Book Overview

Babette Bliss, the decidedly modern heroine of this comical novel, suffers from an unsettling problem: ambivalence. She has taken leave from her job with an avant-garde New York theater to face her dilemmas concerning her marriage, career, and soul. Should she forgive her philandering husband, George Harrison, an Iowa-raised corporate lawyer with an uncanny resemblance to Babette's favorite Beatle? Is it time, in fact, for her and George to have...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872863395
• ISBN13: 9780872863392
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A delightful diversion

Into this slice of New York City life in the '90s comes a heroine on the verge of crisis. Narrator Babette Bliss, 35, frets about her biological clock, her unsatisfying job at an avant-garde theater and her husband's possible infidelity. She has taken the summer off from work to think through her problems, but the theater is threatened by a group of developers and its director is frantic for her to come back and organize some resisitance. Babette, however, planning a confrontation with her husband, is deaf to the director's pleas. And once her suspicions are confirmed she's too distraught to spare a thought for a doomed theater. She decamps to an absent friend's apartment and seesaws between righteous fury and tears, forgiveness and revenge (in kind). In lucid moments she worries about the horrors of apartment hunting, and surviving without her husband's generous income. Into her life comes a roomate, another beneficiary of the apartment owner's largesse. Babette has always considered Carlos Carlos a cad and a phony - for stealing her friend's wife and for changing his whitebread name. But with greater knowledge comes wider understanding - Carlos is not only worthy of sympathy, he's handsome too. And he sees a spark of creativity in Babette that she has long resisted. Meanwhile, her rock singer/shrink has decided to give up therapy and devote herself to music, her husband is leaving plaintive messages on the answering machine in the words of the Beatle he resembles and Babette returns to her theater despite her sense of futility. Should she return to her husband? Have an affair with Carlos? Overcome her writing phobia and become a playwrite? Babette's dilemma's are not earthshaking, nor will her decisions set her life on an irreversible course but Eidus' playful, wisecracking and vulnerable style sweeps the reader into her world.

Blissful

In this comic, ironic tale, Babette Bliss guides us on a totally enjoyable journey through the domestic and artistic pathways of Manhattan, circa 1993. Check out the noise band called Mild Neurosis, and other maddeningly familiar urban icons. --Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Roughhouse

Very enjoyable

Clever, funny, and well written. Like her short stories, and maybe even better.