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There's nothing more deliciously distracting than sinking your imagination into someone else's wildly complex domestic drama.
Lolly Winston, author of the 2004 best seller Good Grief, takes on infertility, adultery, stalking, sex, despair and heartbreak in her compulsively readable new novel, Happiness Sold Separately.
Happiness revolves around the love life of a podiatrist named Ted in Silicon Valley and the two women who love him. His wife, Elinor, is a successful corporate lawyer, and his mistress, Gina, is a health club personal trainer. Yet despite or perhaps because of their ordinariness, readers will find themselves caring about the fate of this fictional trio.
You might describe Winston's novels as Anne Tyler "lite."
This smart wife/guilty male/bimbo triangle could not be more cliched. Yet it works because Winston takes the plot in unexpected, interesting directions.
Clever, disciplined and mordantly funny, Elinor finds herself miserable at 40, though her wit remains sharp, giving the book its tang. Her once-happy marriage to Ted has foundered on the rocks of infertility. Unsuccessful hormone injections have left her overweight, deeply depressed, uninterested in sex and alienated from her husband. She resents her job, which she feels stole her childbearing years from her, and she dislikes her kid-obsessed suburb.
Unable to comfort his wife, Ted has channeled his misery into changing his diet and joining a health club. Enter trouble in the shape of the lithe, lovely Gina, who is more sexually inventive than intellectually alert.
Winston reveals the affair on the first page and spends the rest of the book exploring how this trio works out who belongs with whom. Mercifully, she doesn't go for the typical E-Z chick-lit, spurned-wife-gets-revenge scenario. Instead, she examines friendship vs. love in a marriage, as well as the baby-boomer fixation with solving life's problems with therapy and to-do lists.
Most of all, Winston examines that elusive emotional state called happiness and the often quirky places where people find it. In the end, the reader has enormous empathy for all the characters, including Gina, whose abs are more perfect than her grammar.
Happiness Sold Separately
By Lolly Winston
Warner, 296 pp., $21.99
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