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1.0 out of 5 stars
Please do not purchase this book!, Jul 17 2004
"Dumping Billy" is Olivia Goldsmith's last book. I doubt it represents how she would have liked to be remembered.Protagonist "Kate" has a serious superiority complex-
Her old friends from Brooklyn just don't get her anymore, now that she's a "Doctor" (school psych.) in Manhattan.
Of one friend: "Bina definitely had an irony deficiency." To another: "You've had a haircut" "Nope, just had my ears lowered." Those New Yorkers and their witty repartee! Who could expect the poor folks in Brooklyn to keep up with snappy patter like that? Kate must be referred to as the protagonist, as she is certainly the central character, but a long way from anyone's heroine. (Except, perhaps, her own.) She's elitist, smug, and insufferable:
"Her apartment was in Chelsea, but Kate could pass for a downtown hipster."
"...she was grateful for all she herself had learned about style from Brice, college, Manhattan boutiques and her current New York friends."
"But now that she had a circle of intellectual, cosmopolitan pals, she could give up the frustration over Bina's provincial interests and conversation and simply love her good heart." I don't know about you, but I HATE this woman! I kept waiting for Kate to come to the realization that she was narrow minded and small- I thought the point of the book must be her transformation. Alas, no. Although she doesn't seem bright enough to have completed the SAT (let alone a doctorate) and she is a wretched specimen of a human being, she is rewarded. I expect this from life, but pop novels usually follow more logical standards of good and evil. The sophomoric dialogue is peppered with witty retorts like "Uh, duh!" and other lines I'm loathe to repeat, but in the interest of saving others the afternoon of pain I just experienced, I'll elaborate:
Kate leaves her (homosexual) friends:
"'Say goodnight, Gracie.' 'Goodnight, Gracie,' Elliot and Brice chorused."
(Gay men are so clever....) Kate refers to her Brooklyn girlfriends as her "crew" and her "posse." Do thirty-one year old professional women in Manhattan do this? "If she but knew it, she easily looked the most elegant woman in the room." (Oh god. I felt like I was reading a Babysitters Club book.) And is the "If she but knew it" line a joke? Every page previous to this seemed to exist only to reinforce how wonderful Kate thinks she is! Billy says: "And I can date anyone I want!"
Our protagonist responds: "Not anyone. You can't date me!" "You're just a Mick who never even got out of Brooklyn. The trick with you is you are slightly better looking on the outside than you are on the inside, and the inner and the outer you are in constant conflict. That's why you don't know you're a loser."
This is the conversation of a Psychologist? Again with Billy, Kate the "Doctor" tells him that he has a "repetition compulsion." He references the DSM IV, and mentions the fact that Freud isn't terribly popular these days, then he says "And I don't have a ...petition...whatever."
It certainly seems logical to ME that a man who quotes Freud and the DSM IV would have problems with a big word like "repetition." As others have suggested, I doubt this book was written by Goldsmith. Her books weren't literature, but they were well crafted and amusing.
This book was probably written after Goldsmith's death, (maybe based on an idea she was working on) by a white professional heterosexual male, most likely in his twenties. A terrible waste of trees...
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