From Publishers Weekly
Peyton Amberg is a travel agent who really gets around-in more ways than one. In her latest no-holds-barred take on urban malaise, Janowitz (Slaves of New York, etc.) chronicles the international romps of a modern-day Madame Bovary. With her stunning looks ("usually it would be impossible to find a man who, physically, was her equal"), Peyton has no trouble luring men to bed, but under pressure from her manic-depressive mother, she hastily marries an unsuspecting dentist for money and out of fear that no one else will deem her marriageable. Struck with a bout of ennui after her wedding and tired of trying to live up to the expectations of her in-laws, she rushes back to work and almost immediately takes a cheap trip to Brazil, where she meets a debonair German-Italian man, Germano. In the first of many misadventures, Peyton holes up with Germano in her hotel room, where she is wined and dined and otherwise entertained. With her libido unleashed, she finds it next to impossible to return to a normal life in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and she pulls further away from her husband and, eventually, her young son. Though she perceives herself as self-sufficient, she becomes more and more addicted to her extramarital hanky panky ("A monkey in the zoo... could not have gone on a wilder bender on a weekend pass from its cage"), finding satisfaction in the beds of gangster Xian Rong in Hong Kong and cowboy Sandy in Vegas. Peyton's overactive id and sense of dissatisfaction seem a bit contrived at times, and her comeuppance rather old-fashioned, but Janowitz's trademark mix of humor and gross-out realism give the novel a queasy charge. Author tour.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Billed as a modern-day
Madame Bovary, Janowitz's tenth book traces the rise and eventual ruin of a woman who believes her only resource is her beauty. Bored with her job and desperate to move out of her family's filthy apartment, Peyton marries the first man who asks. She's soon disenchanted with marriage and drifts into a series of infidelities. When her beauty begins to fade, her increasingly desperate need for male attention drives her into situations at first merely humiliating but ultimately degrading and dangerous. Janowitz's eye for the sordid detail is as merciless as ever, and she's in her element describing Peyton's squalid childhood home, her drug-addled and delusional mother, her increasingly dreary succession of affairs, and her nebbishy husband. Ultimately, though, the ferocity of her writing underscores the novel's major flaw: Peyton is so ineffectual and passive, and the supporting characters so uniformly unappealing, that there is little to care about in the story of her downfall. Janowitz built a following with
Slaves of New York (1986), one of the defining books of the 1980s, and she also won acclaim for her recent novel
A Certain Age (1999). Readers will be interested in her latest.
Meredith ParetsCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
