I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You: A Novel
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2014:One way to read Courtney Maum’s funny, smart, frothy first novel is as a primer on why cheating on your spouse is a terrible idea--especially when your wife is beautiful, and French, and a lawyer, and the mother of your child, and she loves you. Another take: monogamy is hard and, as the protagonist puts it, sometimes we need a “secret line to something private.” Or maybe that’s just a lame excuse for self-indulgence. Richard Haddon is a British artist living the perfect ex-pat’s life with his wife, Anne, and daughter in Paris. When his mistress dumps him, and Anne learns of the affair, he struggles not only to win her back, but to revive his passion for fidelity. Richard can be a maddening doofus, and whether you root for him or not may depend on your taste for rom-com sweetness. (There’s a written-for-the-screen quality at work here; I’ve already mentally cast Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.) What lifts the novel above the love lost and found tale is Maum’s well-drawn cast of quirky supporting characters and her exploration of the creative process, primarily Richard’s attempt to rediscover himself as an artist. Is it better to create safe, commercial art and take care of your family or take a risk on art that matters? And is a U.S. passport in a washing machine full of oil a brilliant anti-war protest or just weird? At the core of this clever debut is a bigger question: how do you recover from infidelity and become a better man?--Neal Thompson