Review: It really is a comedy
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 5, 2014
First, for all the reviewers who were disappointed because they thought this book would be funny: nope. It's a comedy because the heroine has a happy ending, not because it's full of humorous situations and dialogues.The author is an insufferably conventional Northeastern English academic. As she opens the book, her newest hobby is dating men from match.com, getting to know them long enough to find some aspect of them inferior, and then rejecting them -- usually with some condescending metaphor.Early in this odyssey, she compares building a relationship to shopping for shoes:"Match.com revealed a whole world of [men] -- screen after screen of square-inch head-shots, men with hope, and history, and humor. I scrolled through the cache of possibilities like I was looking for shoes on Zappos, setting my search parameters for heel height and color. I'd never before felt so in charge of my romantic destiny. But there was a danger to all that abundance. If a pair of shoes doesn't fit, it isn't your feet's fault, is it? ... These were the basic premises that Match.com could either exacerbate or fix: 1) Men had finely tuned decoder devices to ascertain my faults before I knew I'd been caught; 2) I had a special mandate to ferret out the myriad faults of men."Later, though, she realizes that approach to dating does not work:"I'd asked [my father] about marriage, about how you know that someone is right for you, that it's worth holding onto and working through the strife and doubt for. Because the thing that haunted me was how to locate the dividing line: between the necessary compromises of a mature relationship and sacrificing one's values and integrity, between lowering one's idealized expectations and putting up with anyone so as not to be alone. Maddeningly elusive, that line -- you know it's there, and yet it isn't reliably anywhere, and all you can do is grope your way in its general vicinity."As the author dates more men, despite her professed goal -- finding someone on the right side of that dividing line -- she continues quietly grading people and quietly abandoning relationships:"This was all wrong. This couldn't be happening. My people -- we didn't believe in stuff like that. ... I could tell that he had no idea what had happened, no idea how his words had affected me or where I'd gone."And then her comeuppance: a man who (albeit not quite intentionally) treats Mintz the same way. And then a moment of beautiful epiphany. And then the happy ending that makes a comedy.===I had to read this essay twice. The first time, the irritating, condescending, shoe-shopping side of the author spoke so loudly that I formed my entire impression of the essay from her. But the second time, the other side came through more -- the genuinely searching, open and honest side of the author, who is not present in the beginning but starts blooming partway through.