HER

A slim, slight, mean-spirited tale of a woman’s obsession with her fiancé’s ex-fiancée, from the author of Dating Big Bird (2000), etc.

This might have made an entertaining or even enlightening subplot in a novel with a larger vision, but the limited scope and shallow characterizations will leave readers feeling unsatisfied, and maybe cheated. Elise and Donald, both New York City transplants to Washington, D.C., meet on the shuttle. Donald has left a Wall Street career for a more satisfying life as a teacher; Elise has left a job editing Sassy magazine to become a freelance editor of self-help books while returning to school to become a teacher. A year later, when the two are living together and planning their wedding, Adrienne, Donald’s supersophisticated, superhumanly gorgeous ex announces that she’s moving to D.C. Elise, who notes that Donald mentioned Adrienne on their first date and has regularly talked about her since, decides that Adrienne wants Donald back. Enlisting her two friends—Fran, the cynical one; and Gayle, the innocent one—in her battle, she proceeds to behave abominably, going through Donald’s dresser drawers, listening to his voice mail, stalking Adrienne. Too ugly to be funny, too thick with failed wisecracks to take seriously, the story fails to deliver on any level. The characters are so thinly drawn—Fran is insulting and smokes cigarettes; Gayle likes to eat; and Donald, the object of contention, is little more than there except for his habit of dropping his pants and getting on all fours when happy or angry, behavior that remains unexplained and unexplored. It, like so much else, is so readily sacrificed to yet another clichéd laugh-line (New York has better food than Washington! Men like large breasts! Jews are pessimistic! Gayle wants to eat again!) that even the mandatory personal-growth denouement (“ . . . what happens will happen whether I am watching or not”) comes only by means of assertion, not drama.

Nothing new, and the recycling is graceless.