From Publishers Weekly
In this deliciously amusing, multi-barbed novel, condom-carrying New York City yuppies assess one another's looks, apartment sizes, possessions and date-ability with hilarious intensity. Hank Lowe, a rising star in his law firm, swings between love for and disgust with Christine Lustgarden, who has browbeaten him into marriage because she's pregnant. Hank's client Mike Blitsky (aka Mike Mauvais), a transvestite pimp who runs a "call boy" service, is writing an autobiography that Hank's ex-fiancee Dawn (whom he still loves) is editing. Dawn enlists her friend Katherine--an English lit scholar whose entangled love life makes the N.Y.C. subway map look simple--to dig up information on Mike's dark, sordid childhood. The finale, a wedding ceremony, is laugh-aloud funny. Spiegelman ( Soul Catcher ) humanizes her self-possessed characters even as she dispassionately observes their agitated mating dances. This modern version of the old fashioned comedy of manners is a bit like an atonal rendering of a Vivaldi concerto: sometimes weird and off-key, but often subversively funny and fresh.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this thoroughly modern, romantic comedy of errors, several New York yuppie couples trade partners and trade them again on the way to the altar. Dawn has a high-pressure book editing job but maintains a small, immaculate apartment, even as her fiance Hank sends a registered note on his law firm's letterhead to dump her. Their paths intertwine when she edits a book (for which her friend Kath is researcher) about the transvestite madam (pimp?), Mike Mauvais, whom Hank is defending in court. By now Hank's new fiancee, Chris, is about to send him to the financial cleaners, so he moves in with friend Andy, who sleeps with Dawn, Chris, and Kath, among others. Kath's new love Jack meets Chris, and... well, you get the picture. Too New York up-to-the-minute trendy to be of enduring interest, but funny in places.
- Heather Blenkinsopp, Mercy Coll. Lib., Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
