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Thursday, 15 November 2007 |
By Anne Marsella Portobello Books, 2007:
374p, softcover, Village Voice €18, French News €16
If your digestion can handle large helpings of fashion writing,
this first novel by an American writer who lives in Paris will
surprise you, not always unpleasantly. Remedy is a freckled,
Florida girl given to the worship of saints (each chapter of the
book is dedicated to a saint, and the author has unearthed a
quirky flock of them, from Saint Bertilla to Aloysius Gonzaga,
patron saint of young men). When not praying, Remedy works
for ‘A la Mode’, an on-line fashion site, where she churns out
copy about tweed hosiery and one-piece bloomer suits. She also
spends time talking to her cat, lusting after a gay photographer
and avoiding a French aristocrat with a fixation on white cotton
knickers (modish lingerie leaves him as cold as the proverbial fish).
All this would be insufferably cute were it not for the author’s imagination which spirals
towards a loopy, camp finale, with the narrator showing up at a débutante’s ball at the Ritz
wearing a recycled belly-dancer’s costume, on the arm of her “Arabian knight”, a Moroccan
pizza delivery boy who whispers 13th-century Arab erotic poetry into her receptive ears and (in
the original, if you please) Emily Dickinson’s more rapturous lyrics. The craziness of it all ends
up sweeping you along.
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Downtime 
