Self-destructive mania has never been on my list of laughing matter. At least, not until I read Patricia Marx’s fiction debut “Him Her Him Again The End of Him”, a refreshingly bold and humorous take on the repercussions of fatal attraction that stands out from the chick-lit canon.
Marx invites readers into the mind of a neurotic Cambridge graduate student hung up on narcissistic philosopher Eugene Obello, whose feigned English accent and breadth of vocabulary win her vulnerable heart. When Eugene weds the delicate Margaret and disappears for several years, the protagonist abandons her thesis and heads for New York, where she continues to pine over her sleazy “Gene-yus.” Even as she earns an enviable job as a writer for an SNL-esque sketch comedy, “Taped But Proud,” her general disinterest in anything but Eugene’s occasional postcard eventually lead her down an indolent path of unemployment checks and excessive pedicure therapy. That is, until Eugene returns and they recommence a love affair with laughably tragic consequences.
What Marx’s heroine lacks in shrewdness is more than made up for in hilarious digression. Her infatuation with the obnoxious Eugene seems hardly justified—he refers to the narrator as his “singular dodo bird” among other tacky epithets—but Marx provides ample satirical wit to compensate. Though the protagonist’s thoughts hopelessly cycle back to her loathsome obsession, her crazed mental state, lest we sympathize with her, offers some relieving tangential character observations. For instance, her boss at Taped But Proud, Joyce Slutsky, demands freshly squeezed vegetable juice from the bathroom and runs the show like a dentist’s office. “We may have been the only comedy show in history…whose staff was encouraged to floss.”
The book as a whole reads like an epic SNL skit of “The Bell Jar,” which comes as no surprise considering Marx is a former writer of the sketch comedy show. The protagonist’s fixation on her first love is drawn out to pathetic proportions, and the portrayal of Eugene as an utterly ridiculous one-dimensional caricature only adds to the dysfunctional predicament. Nevertheless, despite the fact that nothing very gripping happens in the course of the plot, Marx proves clever enough to set her novel above the level of chick-lit melodrama.
