AMERICAN MERMAID

A writer sells her book to Hollywood and discovers—surprise!—that she is no longer in charge.

Penny Schleeman loves her job teaching English at a public high school in New Haven, but at 33 she’s living in a studio apartment and has to get help from her parents if she needs dental work. “It’s not my fault that it’s not feasible to have a middle-class job anymore,” she tells us. “All I want is to be a teacher.” When her novel about Sylvia, a young woman who transforms into a mermaid, becomes a surprise bestseller, it seems Penny’s money troubles are over. Her new, barracudalike film agent gets her a deal adapting her own book (“the way I make the most cash”), and she quits her job. The catch—and of course there is one—is that Penny has been teamed with two veteran screenwriters who immediately begin to advocate changes that turn Penny’s powerful asexual protagonist, who defeats an evil environmental despoiler, into a love-starved teenager who dies in the end. Penny’s account of her increasingly unhappy stint in Hollywood alternates with chapters from American Mermaid that make palpable how her novel is being travestied (and how some of Sylvia’s conflicts mirror those of her creator). Langbein, a longtime sketch and stand-up comedian, wrings some predictable laughs from the co-writers’ cringingly awful suggestions, but this is familiar stuff; Penny’s wistful recollections of how much she loved teaching are fresher and ring truer. It takes too long for the pace, and readers’ interest, to pick up as some mysterious edits to the master script convince Penny that Sylvia has swum out of her novel to wreak revenge on her enemies. The ambiguous two-part ending teasingly hints that this is possible, and Langbein gives the appealing Penny a shot at happiness on her own terms to wrap up this sharply well-written, but only fitfully engaging tale.

An interesting debut that has more on its mind than this first-time novelist can successfully embody in fiction.