Lipman, Elinor. The Way Men Act. New York: Washington Square Press, 1992.
I had to laugh when I wrote out the title of this blog. Yet another one that could be misconstrued as something juicy and personal. I guess I could write a whole dissertation on the way men act towards me, but that wouldn’t be the book review that this is intended to be.
Elinor Lipman celebrates a birthday in October so it was only appropriate that I try to squeeze in a novel of hers in the last days of the dying month. I have met Lipman before (at a local conference) so it was no surprise to discover The Way Men Act takes place in “my” town. While thinly veiled as somewhere else it was easy to recognize the landmarks and quirks that make up where I live. I have to admit that made reading The Way Men Act a little difficult. The entire time I pictured real store fronts, real schools, real people.
All in all I breezed through this book because it was a simple read. The kind of chick lit you crawl in the bath with and can read in one soak. The plot isn’t complicated, only fun fun fun, the way chick lit is supposed to read. Lipman’s heroine, Melinda LeBlanc returns home to Harrow. She has mixed feelings about being back where she grew up as if being home implies she didn’t make it in the real world. She comes back (single at 30) to work in her cousin’s flower shop. Her job is sandwiched between two other come-home-again classmates from high school: Libby, a fashion designer with her own shop, and Dennis, a wiz at tying flies for fishing for his own shop. In addition to being hung up on being home, Melinda has issues with educational status (Harrow is a snobby college town and she only has a high school degree) and of course, men. The ending was predictable. Melinda is too talented to be working for someone else, and yes, she’s gets the guy.
Favorite line: “Could a man hate me that strenuously that the weight of it would flip itself over and come up again as love?” (p 49)
I flagged other lines only to realize it wasn’t the wording I admired so much. It was Melinda’s relationship with her mother. Every scene had me envious of their obvious closeness.
BookLust Twist: Mentioned twice in Book Lust once in the chapter “Elinor Lipman: Too Good To Miss (p 146), and “My Own Private Dui” (p 165). The latter chapter begs an explanation: Pearl has her own classification system for her books and The Way Men Act falls under the category of “books I reread when I’m feeling blue” (p 166).
~*LunaSea*~ 