CHICK-LIT MAN OF THE MONTH co...

CHICK-LIT

MAN OF THE MONTH company

by way of Jackie Clune

GP Putnam's Son 288 pages, $2495

In Man of the Month form a club British entertainer Jackie Clune's first attempt novel, heroine Amy Stokes is the kind of woman who appears to have everything.

At 39 she hastes a successful business and has a great apartment, a cute dog and the "requisite Five serviceable Friends" prescribed by Marie Claire magazine. She's also got a sneaking suspicion that there might be more to life.

A slightly caustic creative symbol Amy once eked out a living designing "anti-Thatcher oversized T-shirts, cutting feminist slogan aprons and nuclear disarmament bed linens." yet now, her nostalgic (actually meant to be cuttingly ironic and anti-nostalgic) baby gear has grown into a retail empire, cloyingly known as Precious Little Darlings. It's not exactly a dream gig for a committedly single-and- child-free woman, moreover it sure seems to pay well.

Man of the Month unite in a club is one of a spate of novel chick-lit offerings examining the lives, likes and dilemmas of career- oriented women who, having always declared themselves child-free from choice, suddenly get bitten with about sort of reproductive bug and completely change their minds.

allowing it might well be loamed in real-life trends (all those late-in-life mothers are coming from somewhere, surely) it is a difficult situation to write about with any kind of convincing reality.

forward page 34 of Clune's main division Amy is declaring that her "biological clock doesn't f---ing work," nevertheless by page 91 she is desperate to have a child. Clune proffers up several possible explanations for Amy's change of heart: the dog dies, an infant is abandoned at the entrance to her posh baby boutique and, most numerous strikingly, three of Amy's closest friends all become pregnant at the same time.

In the last though, there's almost no way to explain this decision without falling into cliche. The short, breezy form of the chick-lit novel is just not well-suited to the kind of sagacious soul searching that real women fare through in making profound life decisions.

in this way every now and then, Clune appear to bes to swim into deeper waters, exploring the complexities of Amy's choice. She writes, for example, that, "Since her acknowledge private struggle with the baby evil spirits [Amy] had come to realize that the make easys of her ovaries were not just an irritation to be flushed away each month but potential people. This had begun to sit uneasily with her glib disregard for the pro- life lobby"

further instead of exploring this dilemma -- and it is indeed a strange jiffy for women's rights when abortion and all forms of birth ascendency are taken as givens, further miscarriages are viewed as to [i]or[/i] at a great depth traumatic events to be publicly mourned -- Clune simply "resolves" it with a small in number quick, trite sentences, declaring, "The answer, [Amy] saw now, was what she had believed all along. You had to notice every woman's choice -- whether each individual pregnancy was wanted or not."

From the significance Amy decides that she wants to have a child, Man of the Month Club's stratagem unfolds quickly and neatly. In an only-in- a-comic-novel scenario, Amy decides to give herself exactly 12 chances -- a single one-night stand each month timed to coincide with ovulation -- to conceive a baby before she inflects 40. As one would look forward to the attempted one-night stands are integral disasters (a theory: chick lit was invented in the way that that people's bad first date stories would not at any time again be lost to history) and the single in kind interesting prospective father Amy actions turns out to be sterile.

The resulting farce is run-of-the-mill at best, a series of sketches of inappropriate men and bad dating behavior. In spite of this formulaic increase Clune manages a few actually stellar scenes.

Amy's seemingly doomed, on-again-off-again romance with the sterile shore a widowed father of twin girls who had a vasectomy, is sweet and utterly real to life in its randomness. A failed attempt at speed-dating yields something terminate to real insight into human behavior. And, by means of it all, Amy's friends manage to be just the kind of the community you'd want to have in your corner when embarking forward a series of stunningly bad life decisions.

A surprisingly well-crafted ending proposes just enough happily- ever-after to satisfy the patient reader who has waded by the agency of Man of the Month set but, in the end, the work is just not worth the incommode

The great opus of suddenly-eager-to-be-a-mommy lit has nevertheless to be written.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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