Love Sold Separately, Ellen Meister
It’s eleven in the AM and I’m just dragging my butt out of bed — eyes gritty, mouth sour, brain feeling like someone’s spent the night kicking it around in the dirt. In all, it’s a situation mere coffee’s unlikely to fix. Booze, you might think? You’d be wrong about that. The fault, you see, lies with with Ellen Meister and her wildly entertaining new novel, Love Sold Separately. I’d promised myself to set it down at midnight, then at one, then at two, then at... you get the idea.
Like a lot of you, I suspect, much of my reading falls into the category of “rewarding” rather than the narrower, often naughtier category of “fun.” Love Sold Separately is high-octane, rocket-fuel-potency fun, featuring a libidinous, pot-smoking heroine with a Leica-worthy memory and near Holmesian sleuthing skills.
Dana Barry is a down-on-her-luck New York actress whose big break comes in the form of an audition for a sales gig at The Shopping Channel (not to be confused with the Canadian company of the same name), a second-tier televised shopping network à la QVC or HSN. Buoyed by her acting chops and fortified by coffee and an emergency amphetamine, she lands the gig, an afternoon slot selling designer duds and jewelry to the lonely at-home, who crave Dana’s warmth as keenly as they do her wares.
In short order, things go sideways. When a killing at Shopping Channel headquarters puts sound-guy and love-interest, ex-con Lorenzo DeSantis, under suspicion, Dana goes to work, applying her relentless logic and exacting eye for detail to her effort to clear him.
Meister’s writing is at once propulsive and breezy. Here’s Dana and Chelsea, her shopaholic sister, meeting their forbidding, emotionally unavailable father at a swanky Long Island eatery —
By the time they arrived, Kenneth Barry was already seated, a glass of scotch in front of him. He was wearing a fine-gauge cotton sweater in pale salmon, which Dana thought made him look almost human. His angular cheekbones had softened since retirement, and he looked ruddy and healthy. A testament to all those extra hours on the green.
They kissed him hello, and Dana noticed that he was wearing more aftershave than usual. Her father normally smelled like soap or, if it was after work, like something vaguely sterile and Band-Aid-y.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Dana asked. “You smell good.”
“Don’t be funny,” he said.
It was one of his favorite comebacks. The other was Don’t be childish. As usual, she was tempted to respond by sticking her hand under her arm and making a fart noise...She wondered why no one wrote self-help books for retired neurosurgeons who still taught part-time at Columbia and had more intimate relationships with cells on a slide than with human beings, and who couldn’t manage even a single date after their wives left them and moved down to Florida and remarried.
In the best tradition of whodunits, Meister offers a police lineup’s worth of likely suspects and at one time or another, I suspected every one of them. I’m betting you will, too. And I’m betting that, like me, you’ll be surprised at the end.
Meister’s work tends to be characterized as chick lit, whatever that means. But if this is chick lit, count me the fuck in. It reminded me that reading is more than sampling high literature like a rare, double-malt scotch. And I need reminded sometimes. Love Sold Separately is an Arnold Palmer with a double shot of gin. Sit down, take a chug, and have a good time!
If you buy Love Sold Separately, and I think you ought to, look for it at your neighborhood bookstore or bookshop.org. an online retailer that contributes part of its profits to independent booksellers. Jeff Bezos’ pockets are already full.
