A bookworm seeks retribution in this novel about eternal friendship.

Taylor’s protagonist is Eleanor Birch, a medical librarian. Eleanor always looked forward to gatherings with the glamorous Sasha Cole, her longtime friend from prep school. But Sasha makes an odd request at their latest lunch. Referring to her often absent boyfriend, adman Jon Neel, Sasha tells Eleanor: “If anything ever happens to me, I want you to get him.” Baffled by Sasha’s entreaty, Eleanor jokingly agrees to do so. Then Sasha dies in a car accident, crashing into the tour bus for the band Mother’s Laundry. Sasha’s will leaves Eleanor $50,000 to pay for her mission to “get” Jon. At Sasha’s funeral, Eleanor meets the man who will become her accomplice, actor Tony Lowe. Tony helps Eleanor move to New York City and amplify her beauty. He even comes up with a scheme for Eleanor’s crusade: “Listen, seduce and abandon.” To get to know Jon, Eleanor is forced to immerse herself in his bizarre world of advertising, the setting for much of the novel. She also befriends Jon’s mentally disabled brother, Walter, and Walter’s girlfriend, Susan Dietz. Eleanor eventually reaches her goal, only to find out how badly she misinterpreted Sasha’s wishes. In this layered story, Taylor has woven a heartstrings-tugging story of change (whether it’s growth or not is for readers to judge). Eleanor emerges from her chrysalis while Jon becomes a more well-rounded human. It’s almost as if someone has plans for them. Unfortunately, Jon’s agency co-workers remain largely vile people. Still, the author’s well-researched work transports readers and Eleanor, a stranger in a strange land, to the insular world of advertising. What’s odd is that Eleanor, a very intelligent woman, has such trouble getting a true handle on what Sasha meant for her to do. Was it simply vengeance for Jon’s shutting out Sasha, who notoriously picked the wrong men, or was it something more? But this book wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling without Eleanor’s confusion.

This intriguing tale successfully combines reprisal and renewal.

A surreal novel about a promising young academic trying to change his life.

Taylor’s funny, meticulously controlled fiction debut opens with 30-year-old hotshot physicist David Oster finding himself fed up with teaching physics to undergraduates (“It was pitiful when a physicist tried to tell eighteen-year-olds how a ball rolls off a table”) and eager to trade his California Institute of Technology postdoc for something different, something involving pure research. He manages to wrangle an appointment at the prestigious, deep-pocketed Larson Kinne Institute for Applied Physics at Western Washington State University. Once there, he embraces the change, despite the eccentric reputation of the institute’s enigmatic founder and namesake. David is mainly worried about breaking the news to his three girlfriends—classicist Valerie, flight attendant Cosmo, and linguist Helena, with her “weary Modigliani kind of face.” All three seem to take their breakups fairly well, and soon, David encounters the institute’s manic, free-wheeling inhabitants. His new colleagues, especially the splendidly Rabelaisian researcher Viktor Pelliau, steadily draw him into a range of loopy adventures, and David’s natural proclivities for offbeat, problematic romances land him in some amusing relationships. Taylor so skillfully blends David Lodge–style academic farce with Thomas Pynchon–style weird science (mostly of the aquatic variety) that it’s impossible to spot the dividing line between the two. In David Oster, she crafts a perfect, hapless Everyman who faces academic jockeying, lovelorn antics and even an attempted murder with beleaguered charm and an endless supply of snarky one-liners and sardonic observations. The interdisciplinary rivalries at Kinne are particularly well-done, typified by an offhand reference to “whale guys” as “the movie stars of science, appearing on TV with all the creatures they study and to whom they give cute names, but unpopular with real scientists because they are so rich and happy.” The book’s plotlines eventually spiral to pleasingly offbeat conclusions.

An unpredictable, winningly bizarre academic satire.