Tag Archives: romantic comedy

Can There Be Comedy Post-MeToo?

My inspiration for Mick & Moira & Brad was the romantic comedies of Hollywood classics. I wondered whether, in our presumably enlightened but admittedly distressed age, lovers can like as well as lust after each other. Can’t we all get along? Might we actually enjoy each other’s company – even when we have all our clothes on?

I thought the book managed just that. My models were Myrna Loy and William Powell (aka Nick and Nora Charles), and Tracy and Hepburn.

Apparently, the judges of the Independent Press  and the Amor Romance Novel Awards agreed it was worth the effort. Reader’s Favorite and Booklife reviewers, as well as colleagues who generously gave their attention as beta readers, appreciated the humor.

Mick & Moira & Brad is a #MeThree romantic comedy!

So I was dismayed to see an online review that lamented the book fell short of expectations and just wasn’t funny:

Most of the dialogue between all of the characters came off as courteous and very rarely had strong emotion to them. I was looking forward to the fact that this was a romantic comedy, yet I seemed to have missed any humor that might have been intended. 

But courtesy – mutual respect, if you will – was very much the goal of the exercise! I recognized that in trying for civilized discourse I might disappoint readers who crave a good, snarky fight. But in this story, none of the characters throw things or even slam doors.

And some of the humor is between the lines!

– paperback giveaway –

These three are so generous with their story they’re giving away 10 paperbacks.

 

Does the “marriage plot” still work in romance novels?

For generations, a staple of romantic fiction has been a genre called the marriage plot. An underprivileged female protagonist must find a rich, aristocratic husband, or her life will be ruined. Her choices for the future will be to enter a convent or resign herself to spinsterhood.

Amusing scenes in my new romantic comedy, Mick & Moira & Brad, are rooted in post-metoo sexual politics. It’s a “full and frank exchange of views,” as the Brits say. Nevertheless, it’s not a “marriage plot” because Moira’s all-or-nothing goal isn’t a wedding but success in showbiz, provided she’s willing to pay the price of fame. Unlike women of yesteryear, Moira knows the decisions are all hers. But – how to decide?

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is more of a melodrama, also a love triangle, but written years before #MeToo. It’s a story about four friends, which begins when they meet in college at Brown. It updates the question embedded in the old theme. It’s about whether we understand anything about what makes relationships work.

The Marriage Plot is masterful on many levels. At first I wasn’t drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle – Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That’s the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it’s what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other plans, or simply fretting about making up our minds.

This is a literary novel, in the best sense, and I was surprised to read some critics cramming it into the diminutive genre “campus novel.” That would be like classifying Pride and Prejudice as a rom-com, which is not as irrelevant as it sounds. The marriage plot, you see, is the genre form of which that work is representative. Eugenides wants to know whether the marriage plot is dead as a meaningful literary form, now that marriage seems hardly worthy as the ultimate goal of youthful aspirations.

But back to Eugenides. The characters meet in a semiotics class at Brown, and the author gives a lot of detail about the subject and its impact on their personal thoughts. Semiotics claims, for example, that humans would not experience love as we have come to understand it unless we had read about it (or seen movies about it) first. There’s a similar concept in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. The narrator comments that peasants in the French countryside cope with life less well than the sophisticated citizens of Paris, who have all read novels that give them models for how to act in society.

Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don’t. Things work out or they don’t. They mostly don’t, and we move on.

Perhaps significantly, the character in this book who understands himself best is the one whose grasp on reality is most tenuous because he has to work at staying sane. In his acknowledgments, Eugenides credits several experts and sources for genetic research (another theme), but he thanks no one for his extensive detailing of bipolar disorder and its treatment. So naturally I wonder how he came by this information, and at what personal cost.

Mick & Moira & Brad is a romantic comedy about post-metoo sexual politics. It’s all up to Moira – but how to decide?

His only inflatable friend is his swelling ego…

 

What is a young man’s most vulnerable part?

You’d think Rollo would be discouraged, but he continually fails upward.

I suspect that only an avid new female readership will make it possible to resurrect popular interest in male-centered romantic comedies. As evidence it’s women to the rescue, I offer the expert opinion of none other than Jane Austen, who wrote in 1813:

One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.

Literature of the late twentieth century was dominated by male authors. In fact, there was an unrelenting series of Johns, including O’Hara, Steinbeck, Cheever, Updike, and Irving. Humor in the category of literary fiction was dominated by the hirsute likes of Wodehouse, Thurber, Mencken, De Vries, Lefcourt, and Barry. Exceptions included Dorothy Parker, who made a career of lampooning men, and Erma Bombeck, who picked unmercifully on housewives.

Since that time, book industry statistics show that women now buy more books than men do — and today they hold many of the managerial posts at publishing houses. In the area of comedy, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, appearing in 1996, set off a firestorm of book buying in the now sensationally popular genre of chick-lit.

So, one might ask, “Is male-centered comic fiction still a thing?” It is, I suggest, if women embrace it, starting with poor Rollo.

In February, Rollo #1 (the inflatable one) is 99c on Amazon Kindle and FREE from EPUB stores. The other two books in the series are reduced to $2.99 in either format.

The audiobook of My Inflatable Friend is available from Audible and other audio booksellers.

Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill - 3 book series

 

 

 

 

Ever Wonder What It Takes to Make a Pop Singer a Star?

 

With the Grammy Awards – Music’s Biggest Night – set to take place on February 5th, it’s the perfect time to talk about how a music celebrity – like Beyonce´ and Lady Gaga – finally makes it!

A new book – “Mick & Moira & Brad: A Romantic Comedy,” by award-winning author Gerald Everett Jones, is rich with insights into “the biz” – which includes Hollywood and especially the music industry. The book offers a tantalizing view of how major entertainment agencies manufacture celebrity.

The story revolves around a woman with a talent for singing who’s plucked from the legal profession by an aggressive Hollywood agent who reps famous singers…and is determined to do the same for the character known as Moira. But her arrogant billionaire boyfriend has his own plans for his girlfriend and these three characters may butt heads and sparks fly.

Gerald is available for interviews to discuss the timely themes about surrounding his new book – especially how a music star is born and can be thrust into the limelight of pop stardom.

He can also share his “recipe for success,” when it comes to developing stories and characters.

– Paul Sladkus, Host, Good News Planet

Mick & Moira & Brad: A Romantic Comedy – Gerald’s thirteenth novel, available in Kindle from Amazon and trade paperback from booksellers worldwide.

 

Challenges of Post-#Me-Too Relationships

It’s not your mother’s world.

Transparency – Hollywood super-agent Mick McGraw‘s office is glass on all sides.

Loyalty – Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bradley Davenport thinks a dog will always be more affectionate than a spouse.

Determination – Criminal-defense attorney Moira Halimi-Joubert is sure she makes all the decisions. And she can. But as she prepares for a new career on the stage – why is she so unsure of herself?

Kindle is FREE today on Amazon. Go4T!

Thinking About Thinking: A Love Triangle Won’t Roll

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$1.99 December 31 – January 2 – Get It Now

Just posted on BookLife Reviews:

From the prolific Jones (author of the Evan Wycliff Mysteries series, among other titles) comes a witty and timely romance between a criminal defense lawyer who has kept her opera-trained singing a secret in her professional life, an eager and well-meaning talent agent, and a stiff, highly proper financial manager. Readers follow Moira, Mick, Brad, and a host of other engaging characters through their Los Angeles lives as Moira makes the life-altering decision to seize a wild opportunity. She’ll fill in for—and possibly impersonate, if necessary—an international music star who no longer can fulfill her upcoming obligations, a process that entertainment lawyer Mick assures her can make her a star, too … or that she can walk away from once her contract’s up. With little holding her back, save for her potential romance with the seemingly disinterested Brad, Moira leaps at the opportunity to pursue her dreams.

Jones’s prose is fleet and conversational, and the setting and scenes come across vividly. Characters are engaging and witty, especially in their responses to each other; Jones is adept at the parry-and-riposte nature of romantic-comedy dialogue, and his showbiz chatter likewise shines. At times, the character of Brad is opaque, his choices driving the story forward but not always clearly rooted in what readers know of him. Of course, that’s also how it feels to Moira, a cunning and smart woman, whose existence has been upended by surprising new obligations. Jones never lets the comedy—or the element of wish-fulfillment fantasy—inherent in Moira’s situation obscure the real emotion at the story’s heart.

The stakes are high—millions of dollars are on the line—but the novel is breezy, at times even low-key, with Moira already accomplished and established before her fateful choice. That means the narrative at times lacks urgency, but the wit, quips, and situations continually engage. Romantic comedy readers with a love for dry humor may find this right up their alley.

Takeaway: Romantic comedy readers will enjoy this story of a lawyer-turned-music star and her love triangle.

Great for fans of: Virginia DeBerry, Terry McMillan.

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Book Review – Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

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Here’ my book review of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

Of course, she’s not – fine, that is. This isn’t a spoiler. You’d have to suspect as much from the outset. As one of my screenwriting mentors was fond of saying, “No one wants to see The Village of the Happy People.”

Soon after sitting down with this novel, I picked up on its homage to the themes of the book that spawned the contemporary chick-lit genre, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (1996). Bridget’s story owes its aspirational plot to Pride and Prejudice, the 1813 romance by Jane Austen. Both books follow what literary critics have since termed the marriage plot. That is, the female main character’s overwhelming and obsessive goal is to meet and marry the man of her dreams – or, at least, someone who will care for her forever, giving her the kind attention, comfort, and – most important, social standing – that a woman of her fine sensibilities deserves.

[Aside] In counterpoint, Jeffrey Eugenides wrote The Marriage Plot (2011) to examine (and not satirically) whether the marriage plot applies at all to the young people of contemporary society. It’s a fascinating alternative romance, involving a set of relationships that go at least four ways. But other than demonstrating that the old rules don’t apply, Eugenides offers no prescriptive message for the future.

But back to poor Eleanor. She’s a young, highly intelligent, single woman in the urban society of today’s Glasgow. She holds a sensible and reliable job as an accountant in a small graphic design firm. She calls the designers “the creatives.” They are trendy and self-confident. Her mates regard her as lackluster and back-office.

Eleanor tells her story in the first person, confessing her foibles, her aspirations, and her hangups. She believes she is flawed both physically and emotionally, but she persists in her belief that she is, overall, fine – coping nicely. Her goals seem limited and achievable – until she develops a crush on a handsome musician. He’s a local struggling artist who already has something of a name and a rep. They’ve never met. She admires him from a distance, until her following him verges on outright stalking.

Meanwhile, Eleanor has developed a real, albeit awkward, friendship with Raymond, a geeky schlump at the office. He seems much more interested in her than she is in him.

Do you have enough clues so far? You’d be right in suspecting that Eleanor’s story isn’t just another retelling of Bridget’s. You’d also rightly suspect – and I’ll stop short of spoilers here – that the rock star will be less than stellar and the schlump will be surprisingly sympathetic.

But it’s not just a relationship story, regardless of its homage to the marriage plot. Eleanor has serious issues as chilling as today’s grimmest headlines, and she’s in denial about how well she’s coped. How she eventually confronts the conflicts in her own psyche will be found in Gail Honeyman’s ultimately devious and unsuspected twists of plot.

Woody Allen meets Nick Hornby in this hilarious beach read. Gerald Everett Jones, who is every bit as clever as Larry David (and has more hair!), has created a witty, literate George Costanza for us to savor. NBC, are you paying attention? — Paula Berinstein, producer and host of The Writing Show podcast

Thinking About Thinking #20 – Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler – Sweet and sour?

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Here’s my book review of Vinegar Girl,by Anne Tyler.

Vinegar Girl is a title in the publisher’s Hogarth Shakespeare series, which implies the book was inspired by one of the Bard’s plays. Tyler’s romantic comedy is not so much a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew (which Broadway musical fans will recognize as Kiss Me, Kate) as it is a latter-day riff on its theme.

The main character’s name is Kate, which is the key similarity to the old tale, but this Kate is by no means a shrew. She’s an independent woman. (And perhaps that’s the essential point.) It’s not that this Kate hates men – she’s mostly indifferent to them. She honors her father, widowed Dr. Louis Battista, a ditsy research scientist who spends most of his time holed up in his lab with dozens of mice. She indulges her sister Bunny, a teen-with-attitude who (no surprise) won’t clean her room or do her own laundry. Kate tends to the two of them in a big, old house and not only washes their clothes but also cooks and does just enough housekeeping to avoid the appearance of a rat’s nest. As well, she works as an assistant at a private preschool where the teachers are mostly fussy older women who disapprove of both her unmarried status and her wardrobe, which consists of jeans and tops and the one denim skirt she wears when her pants are all in her neglected pile of laundry.

She’s not unattractive – she’s tall and slender with olive skin and long, silky black hair. But she hasn’t had a date in mouse-ages, and she isn’t sufficiently motivated to go after the only male teacher at the school, who happens to be about her age and presumably unattached. But her life’s awkward routine changes suddenly when the doctor formulates a solution to a problem that has been nagging him: The work visa of his brilliant research assistant Pyotr is due to expire. A neat resolution would be to induce Kate to marry him so the klutzy fellow needn’t go back to Russia before their research project is completed.

How this plays out won’t come as a surprise if you know your Shakespeare or your Cole Porter. As in Tyler’s other novels, the emotional turning point is subtle. One clue is an exchange between Pyotr and Kate when she warns him that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Kate begins to realize that his grasp of English is much better than he lets on when he wryly asks his “vinegar girl” why she would even want to catch flies.

Happily ever after? Gimme a break – what world do you live in? But as Kate might say if you pressed her, if she’d wanted to be bored she’d have married someone else.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #19 – How can a clever girl beat the game?

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Here’s my book review of An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin.

You may already know that actor-comedian Steve Martin not only writes gags and skits, but also screenplays, plays, and several books. (He’s also a talented five-string banjo player!) An Object of Beauty is a humorous novel about a scheming young woman making her way in the aristo world of New York art galleries. Oh, and you can add art connoisseur, historian, and collector to Martin’s credentials. He has his own multimillion-dollar private collection, so researching this book probably took little more effort than looking around the walls of his home and remembering details of those transactions.

Main character Lacey Yeager is a looker with brains who has no qualms about sleeping her way to the top of the art-world rat heap. She is sexy, clever, manipulative, shameless, and almost totally heedless. And in this story she goes from being a newbie intern to proprietor of her own trendy gallery. And along the way she goes through boyfriends almost as often as the Manhattan fashion trends shift. There’s the serious, caring metrosexual journalist, a gallery owner or two, a pop artist, a rich playboy broker who may be a scammer, and an FBI agent.

You’ll learn a lot about art – how it’s made, how it’s valued, and what’s in and what’s out. Lacey is one of those characters whose outrageous attitudes don’t fail to fascinate. She’ll hold your attention and keep you guessing what clever ploy she’ll try next. But, oddly enough for a book so well crafted, there are several major plot threads that simply go nowhere or are resolved in uninteresting ways. Did Martin get bored with them? Or did he decide those yarns would be too much of a hassle to spin out or explain? Or is he somehow saying – that’s life – that situation you’re worried about might not turn out as you expect – in fact, it might not go anywhere at all!

For example, I’m dying to know whether there’s a Rembrandt under that Russian painting. So if you happen to run into Steve in the grocery store, please ask him for me.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.