|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
Eden Collinsworth knows her way around publishing. She was a founder of the glitzy LA style mag, BUZZ, and hung on through its ugly demise. She moved on to become an editor and publisher at Arbor Books, and from there she became Director of Cross Media Business Development for the Hearst Corporation. She uses all of her media experience and passion for the written word as fodder for her new novel, IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN WHAT HE SAID. It's the story of the rocky dissolution of a marriage founded on a love of literature. Isabel Simpson is 28 and already the president of a small publishing company when she chances to read a piece by a writer named James Willloughby. She's captivated by his essay on growing up on his family estate in Virginia and tells her second-in-command that she wants to meet him. Though her trusted associate, a close friend and even Willoughby's own agent try to warn her away from working with this difficult, freeloading bon vivant, Isabel insists on having lunch with him to explore the possibility of a book deal. James agrees, not because he wants to write a book, but because he's interested in Isabel's checkbook. At lunch, James behaves in an outrageously discourteous manner, and Isabel puts him squarely in his place. She is understandably skeptical about having any further dealings with him, but James recognizes in Isabel a woman of his own intelligence and sets out to court her. They meet in Paris on their way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, fall passionately in love and marry a very short time thereafter. United by good sex and the love of words, they are happy, and in short order they produce a child they name Burgo. These two get along reasonably well until Burgo turns 12 and his mother tries to kill his father. The book is a search for the reasons that forced someone like Isabel to resort to such extreme violence. The answers are found deep in her childhood, in her relationships with her distant father and enigmatic mother. This book is less a crime novel and is more about a woman's irrational hope that romantic love might change her beloved into the person she imagines he could become. There's really not much by way of suspense here. We know from the first line that Isabel tried to kill James and, for me, her reasons for doing so didn't carry enough weight to make this story a tale of psychological suspense. The story is well-written enough that Collinsworth makes the reader feel like a voyeur in the corridors of the rich and powerful, and that's always fun. She knows all the names to drop and drops them everywhere. James's handmade Italian loafers provide her first clue that he might be a very expensive man to keep. At varying points in the narrative, they live in New York, Los Angeles and Paris. For awhile, Isabel commutes every weekend, living in Los Angeles and working in New York. The story drips with money, privilege and entitlement, and not all of it James'. IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN WHAT HE SAID is well-written story, sliding along at a good clip. The book's major shortcoming is its pretension to be something more than an entertaining romance gone wrong. The narrative is crammed with allusions to Henry James, Edith Wharton and Jane Austen, and it's here that Collinsworth over-reaches. She's written a good story, one well worth reading for its entertainment value, but this is not a tome destined for the modern classics bookshelf.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, August 2006
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]
| 
